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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

#331

Post by prasoon2211 »

bondarchuk wrote: post #310
maeln wrote: post #230

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…

"it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose" Did you mean to say "it is not an amount that asml cannot afford to lose" or "it is an amount that asml can afford to lose"?

Right, it took me a couple of re-reads and I (non-native speaker) ended up asking ChatGPT about it and yes, the sentence is worded incorrectly

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#332

Post by badsectoracula »

Degorath wrote: post #279
dewey wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would benefit from the talent pool of all EU I get what you are saying, but one of the core benefits of the EU is the freedom of movement and residence so I don't think not having a remote work policy is disqualifying them from being an EU AI company.

I agree with the OP that it sort of is. Moving around in the EU is a lot more difficult than moving around the US, so a lot of great talent just doesn't want to.

I've worked a bit in Poland and UK (before Brexit) and all i had to do was to take a plane and fly to the target city. I do not remember having any particular difficulties, if anything finding a place to live was the hardest thing but that is an issue with moving in general (including within the country), not moving across EU.

I'm not into traveling but i'm pretty sure i can grab a plane/train/bus/whatever and go any EU city i feel like.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#334

Post by dmos62 »

renewiltord wrote: post #330
rlupi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on. Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints…

This is surely meaningless. ASML's machines only work because of the US. This is not a geopolitical risk. This is a highly globalized process and all participants are significantly irreplaceable. If the US wants to harm ASML they just stop export of certain parts and materials. This would be utterly retarded because we're all on the same team here.

> utterly retarded

A certain golden man might disagree with you there.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#335

Post by prasoon2211 »

alcinos wrote: post #250
lordofgibbons wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> We've just only started RL training LLMs That's just factually wrong. Even the original chatGPT model (based on gpt3.5, released in 2022) was trained with RL (specifically RLHF).

RLHF is not the "RL" the parent is posting about. RLHF is specifically human driven reward (subjective, doesn't scale, doesn't improve the model "intelligence", just tweaks behavior) - which is why the labs have started calling it post-training, not RLHF, anymore.

True RL is where you set up an environment where an agent can "discover" solutions to problems by iterating against some kind of verifiable reward AND the entire space of outcomes is theoretically largely explorable by the agent. Maths and Coding are have proven amenable to this type of RL so far.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#336

Post by 0xfffafaCrash »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #288
Degorath wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the OP that it sort of is. Moving around in the EU is a lot more difficult than moving around the US, so a lot of great talent just doesn't want to.

Is it? I get that there's housing crises and cost of living is expensive in the tech hubs, but if you live in one country and want to work in the other you just... go there, sign in with the local county that you live there now, and done. Or am I missing something?

For one thing, language…

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#337

Post by jacekm »

maeln wrote: post #230

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…

I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)

I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.

Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#338

Post by mrtksn »

louis_saglio wrote: post #256

LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.

This is very bad analogy, there is no case of different layers of abstractions here.

The machines that ASML make are just a tool that TSMC uses, TSMC doesn’t wrap the machines. Nvidia is also not a TSMC wrapper, TSMC is just a contractor for Nvidia. LLMs happen to use Nvidia stuff a lot but, definitely no wrapping.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#339

Post by pyrale »

tonkinai wrote: post #269
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.

I would make a wild guess that this is a policital invesment. It's hard to believe Mistral is the right choice to throw in 1.7B€ for economic reason.

Since 2024, it's hard to make an investment that has no political nature.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#340

Post by np1810 »

burnte wrote: post #272
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASML in turn wraps a bunch of companies for lenses (Carl Zeiss), lasers (Trumpf), etc [0] Given lenses and microchips are both made from sand, I'm gonna conspiracy theory that LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand. [0] https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...

> LLMs were invented by sand companies to sell more sand. Big sand will eat us all. First they squeezed out all the small time sand farmers, now they own the market and need to boost throughput!

> Big sand will eat us all.

Sand companies more like sandworms who are producing melange (Chips) and not hesitating to eat away its consumers (Users) on the way... (# Dune vibes)

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