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Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

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Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#371

Post by touwer »

simion314 wrote: post #144
pu_pe wrote: post #138

I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).

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.

Their coding models are quite good actually, and fast

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#373

Post by khamidou »

mattlutze wrote: post #303
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…

> Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). While Mistral is the one directly in the front of the Frontier LLM race at the moment, I would encourage you to also look at DeepL and Proton. They both actually have a sophisticated and significant setups for model research and deployment.

Proton uses mistral under the hood

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#374

Post by ph4evers »

jules wrote: post #368
mlinsey wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With a new French CEO, such a coincidence

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#375

Post by armarr »

bakugo wrote: post #27
armarr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.

That's EU hosted but not EU trained

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#377

Post by paulddraper »

kaechle wrote: post #344
bondarchuk wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"While 1.3B€ is not pocket change, it is also an amount that ASML can not afford to lose." - The sentence is framed like a contrast but then instead it says the same thing twice.

I’ll see your pedantry and raise you ... more pedantry. The sentence may be a bit clunky, but there’s nothing grammatically wrong with it. And you’re leaving out the first sentence, which frames the comparison: > 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 los…

Either incorrectly worded, or very poorly worded.

It's a open question as to which one.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#378

Post by mark_l_watson »

khamidou wrote: post #373
mattlutze wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mistral is the only serious "AI" company in the EU right now (if you exclude company working on the hardware side). While Mistral is the one directly in the front of the Frontier LLM race at the moment, I would encourage you to also look at DeepL and Proton. They both actually have a sophisticated and significant setups for model research and deployment.

Proton uses mistral under the hood

True, and their integration is pretty good - I laid down money for their Lumo paid plan - happy with it.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#379

Post by aakkaakk »

slt2021 wrote: post #353
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...

Carbon based lifeform trying to create Silicon based lifeform

Elon is doing both.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#380

Post by BoorishBears »

epolanski wrote: post #369
BoorishBears wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gatherin…

This just goes back to my original point: you don't feel pressure to keep up with all the solutions out there, and are ok taking what's good enough.

Mistral can bank on others doing the same, and I have no doubt they'll be able to get along doing so. They're not in the most competitive home market either, so I do think they'll stay at the front of "EU-native" foundation models.

But last week a Chinese delivery app casually chucked a model that's stronger than anything Mistral has ever released on HF (with an MIT license). When that's the competition, their current strategy is rough to say the least.

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