Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airbus
Exception
Northvolt, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, ASML itself, Arianespace, Thales, they all receive EU funding and support
Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
361–370 of 437 posts
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#362Earlier 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.
Isn't this factually wrong? Grok-4 used as much compute on RL as they did on pre-training. I'm sure GPT-5 was the same (or even more)
It was true for models up to o3, but there isn't enough public info to say much about GPT-5. Grok 4 seems to be the first major model that scaled RL compute 10x to near pre-training effort.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#363ASML 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 comp…
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries.
That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innovation.
There is without a doubt some level of influence & assurances from the EU behind this deal.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.
It's very difficult. It took ASML 20 years, and Apple has none of the core competences to make this happen, like optical lithography, EUV optics, plasma physics, vacuum, laser, sources...and then they would have to catch-up to the other tech. For example, today's top end ASML stages accelerate with >10g while still having nm position accuracy.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#365I 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.
Maybe something like https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/ai/overview.html ?
Everybody in that space does it, or at least tries to.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#366Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#367LLM companies are Nvidia wrappers, who is a TSMC wrapper, who is an ASML wrapper. So Mistral is just an ASML wrapper.
ASML is "just a wrapper" for US technology licensed to them because Canon and Nikon were too close in size to each other to privilege one or the other. So we bestowed it on guy #3 (who bought guy #4) out of preventing anti-competition.
Sure, all technology is invented in the US. Only the US
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#368ASML 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 dunno if ASML is lacking any political favor that Mistral can give them, they are already one of the most critical companies for Europe and the entire western supply chain. There is a possibility this is a step towards building a full-stack all-EU AI - if AI delivers on the hype, the EU will certainly want to have one they fully control without dependency on either the US or China. But this would mean having an EU-…
What they are buying is support of the French.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best". It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster". Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them. For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opu…
Pretty far off the mark. I've spent the last year building an AI product in a situation with really cut throat margins: I've post-trained every model Mistral has released in that time frame that was either open-weights or supported fine-tuning via Le Platforme (so I've gotten them at their absolute best case) Mistral's models are not competitive anymore, and haven't been for most of that time. Gemma 27b has better wo…
And I have spent the last year building multiple ones.
While I can't claim to have tested everything, especially as we aren't going to change our stack every single week as something releases, I can speak for my recent knowledge of comparing Mistral small and Medium (their summer releases) with offerings from Google, OAI and Anthropic.
For our use cases, where little thinking is required and its mostly about gathering and transforming data Mistral offered the lowest cost per $. There is no single cloud out there that could compete on the cost per token or speed, bar Gemini flash.
We'll re evaluate and test in the future, but we're very satisfied in a way that only Gemini flash did for us before.
Plus, they are from EU and we're very glad to sustain an European business, we'll only consider alternatives if we need them or the current offering isn't competitive anymore, that's still not the case.
Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 comp…
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries. That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innova…
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.