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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#301

Post by nananana9 »

antupis wrote: post #263
piyush_patel_ha wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.

Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.

When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#302

Post by alexey-salmin »

swiftcoder wrote: post #254
tasoeur wrote: post #81

Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/

> Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/ Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage? Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower…

> quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.

Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.

And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#303

Post by madeofpalk »

riffraff wrote: post #152
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…

I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI. Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".

The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#304

Post by olowe »

poisonborz wrote: post #268

For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.

Mistral now serves GLM-5.2: https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#305

Post by aurareturn »

debugnik wrote: post #293
aurareturn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is profitable. Gross margins are high. The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.

Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.

The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.

Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#306

Post by prolly97 »

nickpp wrote: post #181
boonzeet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to: Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising Unfair…

> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices. Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also mea…

This!!!

I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.

I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#307

Post by ACCount37 »

TheJCDenton wrote: post #135
davedx wrote: post #45

Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…

Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.

In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#308

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

TheJCDenton wrote: post #135
davedx wrote: post #45

Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…

One is american, the other is european

It's the same with gaming

When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"

Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#309

Post by aurareturn »

surgical_fire wrote: post #204
aurareturn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is growing 10x revenue every year. They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year. When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their…

> They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029! > When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%. If their margin…

  If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#310

Post by moffkalast »

ywvcbk wrote: post #184
pavlov wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior. My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SE…

There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation. Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.

Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.
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