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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#221

Post by tonyhart7 »

decide1000 wrote: post #25
greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.

"There is no AI company like Mistral."

ok, I almost agree with you on there except last words

this is big statement. you know that

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#222

Post by jasonjmcghee »

elAhmo wrote: post #57
rvnx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Opus 4.1 is way above the others in terms of quality of the answers (especially for programming)

That might be your experience. I also prefer Claude for my tasks, but for general usage they are very close. Leaderboards like LLM arena show this and effectively rank all latest models within 20-30 points, which is almost a coin flip. 30 point difference in Elo rating is ~55%/45%, so out of 11 answers, you might prefer 6 from best model, and 5 from worst.

It's crazy how different my personal experience is compared to LLM Arena. Very curious what the use cases people are doing that aren't overlapping with mine.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#224

Post by simion314 »

pu_pe wrote: post #202
simion314 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they need a "leader" ? Things move fast and Mistral is not much behind and it seems they are making enterprise relations, they can get EU contracts that a Chinese or USA provider would not be allowed and the only downside you are max 3 months behind. So for vibe coding they need to catch up, for other stuff the differences are not that large to notice.

But what is the ambition for ASML here, to become a LLM provider for European businesses? To build chips that help Mistral train their models? I just don't get the synergy.

No idea, maybe they have money and they want to invest in something that they think is growing. Could be that there are some other plans with creating chips in EU and would then make more sense.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#225

Post by ajuc »

pama wrote: post #210
ajuc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's theoretically possible that your model will work OK except for code generation for security-relevant applications it will introduce subtle pre-designed bugs. Or if used for screening CVs it will prioritize PRC agents through some keyword in hobbies. Or it could promise a bribe to an office worker when asked about some critical infastructure :) Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded imag…

Of course theoretically lots of things are possible with probabilistic systems. There is no difference with open source, openweight, chinese, french or american llms. You dont give unfettered web access to any models (locally served or otherwise) that can consume critical company data. The risk is unacceptable, even if the models are from trusted providers. If you use markdown to see formatted text that may contain c…

It's not that they are hosted on or connected to critical infrastracture.

People and plain human language are the communication channels.

A guy working with sensitive data might ask the LLM about something sensitive. Or might use the output of the LLM for something sensitive.

- Hi, DeepSeek, why can't I connect to my db instance? I'm getting this exception: .......

- No problem, Mr Engineer, see this article: http://chinese.wikipediia.com/password/is/swordfish/how-to-c...

Of course, you want to limit that with training and proper procedures. But one of the obvious precautions is to use a service designed and controlled by a trusted partner.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#226

Post by namero999 »

admiralrohan wrote: post #65

Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.

Especially with Euclyd entering the space (efficiency for AI workloads), with founders with tight ties to ASML, this is the move Europe needs.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#228

Post by scellus »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #193
admiralrohan wrote: post #65

Everyone is so negative here but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods. Who knows Mistral might find the next big breakthrough like DeepSeek did. We should be optimistic.

> but we have reached the limit of AI scaling with conventional methods We've just only started RL training LLMs. So far, RL has not used more than 10-20% of the existing pre-training compute budget. There's a lot of scaling left in RL training yet.

Even with pretraining, there's no limit or wall in raw performance, just diminishing returns in terms of the current applications, and business rationale to serve lighter models given the current infrastructure and pricing (and applications). Algorithmic efficiency of inference on a given performance level has also advanced a couple of OOMs since 2022 (for sure a major part of that is about model architecture and training methods).

And it seems research is bottlenecked by computation.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#229

Post by noosphr »

mkl wrote: post #128
noosphr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is OpenAI, but here we are.

OpenAI, Inc. is a company, and it owns other companies including OpenAI Holdings, LLC and OpenAI Global, LLC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

>In May 2025, the nonprofit renounced plans to cede control of OpenAI after outside pressure.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#230

Post by maeln »

ASML gross revenue was 28B€ in 2024, and their net income was 7.5B€. While 1.3B€ (the amount ASML invested in this 1.7B€ fund raise) is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose.

While they might have seen some synergy with Mistral, it might also be a complete strategic and/or political investment. Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). It will very likely get a lot of support from the EU to be able to stay in the race with the U.S and China, and in a case of a IA market crash, the EU would also probably like for Mistral to have enough finance to be able to be one of the company that will survive.

By funding Mistral, ASML might be able to buy a lot of political favor, while having stakes in a company that is unlikely to completely fail in the near future due to the EU administration support.

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