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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

koenvangilst.nl

191–200 of 230 posts

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…

You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people. Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.

Maybe we will have only agents, soon.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#193
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don’t need US’s Trojan horse in the EU

Interesting. Could you elaborate. As a pro Europe Brit I'm interested to understand this viewpoint. Is it a widely held perspective do you know?

I think that while y'all were appreciated members and definitely had a lot to offer, you also had a lot of annoying carve-outs and kept stalling needed measures to federalize and strengthen the EU more so we can be a proper superpower in our own right.

Maybe it's good you left for now, maybe we can finally get these things done. And once that's accomplished and enough of the gammon has died off, you can always rejoin :-)

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…

re: #4 Maybe it’s easier if you grow up in the system and know how to navigate the written and unwritten rules, but as a dual Canadian-American who recently gained Austrian citizenship, the regulatory friction is absolutely real. I decided to launch a new venture through an Austrian GmbH. There are supposedly streamlined paths for local residents, but I had to go through the standard corporate pipeline. I spent three…

That catch-22 is supposed to be broken by the bank. It's a two phase commit where you open the account in a special state where you can only deposit the capital. Then the bank gives you evidence you've done so, you take that to the notary and open the company, then send the evidence you've done that back to the bank to convert it into a full account.

It's a bizarre system that Switzerland uses too. I've done it twice. Unfortunately the German speaking world has a lot of rules that are trying to eliminate all risk for investors and employees. The GmbH/AG capital requirements are just the start.

The next fun thing you might have encountered, at least in Switzerland, are rules that literally say your company's assets can't fall below 50% of your initial capitalization. If it does you're supposed to raise funds or make more investment of your own private capital and this rule pierces the usual liability requirements. Even more fun: it turns out that this law isn't actually enforced and locals regularly ignore it. But bad accountants won't tell you that. They'll just inform you of the law when you do your yearly accounts.

Then you have wealth taxes that cover the valuation of a startup as if it were a cash position. So if you raise $100M in investor funding then whatever shares you have left over are considered to be liquid assets you can offload at will, and are wealth taxed as such. The fact that the shares don't trade in a liquid market is irrelevant to the tax authorities. In Zürich at least that got patched by the local tax office deciding that startup shares aren't counted for the wealth tax, but this just means you have to be able to convince the tax authority that your company is a startup. The way they determine this is more or less just the opinion of whoever at the tax office assesses your case. Does it sound "startuppy" enough?

Fixing this stuff isn't hard, but it never gets fixed because European politics is both quite stagnant and dominated by people who view hostility to business as a virtue signal. They don't want to fix it because they think businesses are sort of like oil fields. They just exist, lying around naturally, and the only question is how to maximally exploit them.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#195
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO. I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is t…

Should it, though? I think an European company, taking Chinese models, perhaps doing its own post-training on them and training the Chinese-ness out, with a great chat service, enterprise API and coding agent, could be pretty valuable in itself.

What does “training the Chinese-ness out” even mean?!

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#196
post #63

Sounds like they don’t have a moat at all. It’s like software consultancy with a data centre. And then the article mentions many customers using these models on prem (so data centre is not really a plus). What’s stopping any country backed startup from fine-tuning small open source models?

No one in Europe will buy from a random startup, the consultancy part is a MUST to do businesses with big corps, banks, finances, insurances, governs, public administration ...

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#197
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO. I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is t…

> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…

> 4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc.

Agreed. My own anecdote: my company is global and for the past 6 months, we've been working on getting regulatory and legal approval for an LLM-based feature. The initial proposals of going live in all of our markets have been pared back to exclude Europe altogether due to the regulatory environment.

When I took part in company-wide gen AI councils that reviewed new product rollouts, it seemed like there was a definite hesitation from higher ups from pushing out any leading edge features to European markets. And it's not that the regulations would necessarily block these features from going live but that they'd increase implementation costs to the point where it wouldn't be worth it.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#198
post #3

> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers. Mistral leaning into on-prem and European-hosted models is very smart.

Respectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead. Who else will buy their AI? and what other options do they have?

There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#199

OK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 are currently best in the small size; Mistral's "small" model has ~4x the parameter count at 120B and isn't even competing with models a quarter i…

I think it really depends on what you’re doing. I use mistral for many tasks in https://phrasing.app and they blow models many times their size out of the water.

None of my tasks use reasoning though (reasoning actually kills the performance) so perhaps that’s why. Still, I just had to rewrite my pipeline, and mistral was both faster, cheaper, and substantially better than any alternative

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#200
post #56
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.

DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.

Not in many tasks. I use deepseek as a fallback in https://phrasing.app and it’s always very apparent when it happen (due to mistakes/clear performance drop off)
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