231–240 of 437 posts
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> I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns. I did. Some of my clients by design host everything on German servers of Azure and call it a day.
Did you correct them or do you wait until they get a warning letter from some shady law firm for violating GDPR?
I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup. What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
The most strategic move ASML can make is change its licensing structure such that Apple will have to pay 30% of their revenue for using their Fab platform.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/new-us-rule-foreign-chip-...
I don’t really get why ASML is putting money into Mistral AI. ASML is specialized in lithography machines. Mistral, on the other hand, is yet another LLM startup. What’s the actual synergy here? The closest angle I can imagine is that AI workloads drive demand for more chips, but I believe ASML is already selling everything it can make.
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…
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 work…
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Past Mistral investors: JC Decaux (urban advertizing), CMA CGM CEO (maritime logistics), Iliad CEO (Internet service provider), Salesforce (client relation management), Samsung (electronics), Cisco (network hardware), NVIDIA (chips designer)[0]. I agree ASML is a surprising choice, but I guess investments are not necessarily directly connected to the company purpose. BTW, I generated that list by asking my default se…
The list seems to be missing a couple of other notable investors: Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO), Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Microsoft (only $16M).
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OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?
The GPT-OSS-120B release was pretty decent and you could run it on vLLM, Ollama and a bunch of other stuff on day one, despite MXFP4, are you not entertained? I mean, it's even close to GPT-5 mini in some benchmarks: https://llm-stats.com/ As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones. For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/ I have…
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Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away. This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The E…
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier. Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when co…
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There are concerns besides spying if you really don't trust the source of an open model. One is that the training incorporates a bias (added data or data omission) that might not be immediately apparent but can affect you in a critical situation. Another is vendor lock-in, if you end up depending on specifics of the model that make it harder to swap later. That's true regardless of the source, of course.
> Another is vendor lock-in, if you end up depending on specifics of the model that make it harder to swap later. Wouldn't that 'concern' apply to mistral too. I don't see how the word 'another' can be used here?