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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

#391

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

mattlutze wrote: post #306
benjiro wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a "Europe" issue alone but even more locally. Saying this as a IT guy, we had way too many talks with banks about IT projects that in the US will have been way easier. But in specific EU countries was constantly met with "amazon does that, why bother" type of comments. Even on governmental level, talking about "innovative investments", it was like talking to walls. As you expect, a lot of companies (and peopl…

It's very simple to found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein, with a single/simple accounting to manage. And you don't have to live in the US to do it. Europe/EU/EEA don't have a comparable setup. Found in one country, deal with workers in many, filings in all of the countries you're doing business, and more. The new proposed EU Incorporation would go a long w…

Has anyone thought about starting a "meta company" which attempts to provide a cross-national "compatibility layer" for doing business all across the EU?

For example, you could fill out a single set of paperwork, and then paperwork gets automatically generated for each individual country you want to do business in.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#392

Post by [deleted] »

Wytwwww wrote: post #381
mattlutze wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple to found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein, with a single/simple accounting to manage. And you don't have to live in the US to do it. Europe/EU/EEA don't have a comparable setup. Found in one country, deal with workers in many, filings in all of the countries you're doing business, and more. The new proposed EU Incorporation would go a long w…

> found a company in the US that has access to the entire 50 states and all of the investors therein Yes but tech companies and startups are still highly concentrated in a handful of locations.

[deleted]

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#393

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

chvid wrote: post #203
greyb wrote: post #3

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…

France has some of the best computer scientists in the world. Cheap energy. Rule of law and is overall an extremely desirable place to live.

NYT: "Why France’s Financial Woes Are Pushing Its Government to the Brink"

https://archive.is/oXDiI

I understand Marine Le Pen and friends are on track to win the presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#394

Post by nirv »

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.

> It’s hard to believe that Mistral isn’t the right choice to invest €1.7B in for economic reasons.

Why? Cursor, essentially a VSCode fork, is valued at $10B. Perplexity AI, which, as far as I'm informed, doesn't have its own foundational models, boasts a market capitalisation of $20B, according to recent news. Yet Mistral sits at just a $14B.

Meanwhile, Mistral was at the forefront of the LLM take-off, developing foundational (very lean, performant and innovative at the time) models from scratch and releasing them openly. They set up an API service, integrated with businesses, building custom models and fine-tunes, and secured partnership agreements. They launched user-facing interface and mobile app which are on par with leading companies, kept pace with "reasoning" and "research" advancements; and, in short, built a solid, commercially viable portfolio. So why on earth should Mistral AI be valued lower? Let alone have its mere €1.7B investment questioned.

Edit: Apologies, I misread your quote and missed the "isn't" part.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#395

Post by yieldcrv »

paulddraper wrote: post #377
kaechle wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

language exists to convey a shared concept, you don’t think the sentence means “it’s a lot of money for ASML to risk losing?” and wouldn’t have been mentioned if it meant inconsequential or small?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#397

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

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"?

I think the meaning behind this confusing-ass phrase is, "It's an investment that ASM cannot miss out on making" ('amount' is a brain-teaser to throw you off the intended meaning)

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#398

Post by vanjoe »

littlestymaar wrote: post #384
Jackpillar wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country Very few people in Europe understands how the EU works (do you?), I don't think it's reasonable to expect people from outside to understand it.

What would have to change for you to consider it a country? It has a government, there has been talk of a European Army. It has a sovereign currency. If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada! Check out our politics.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#399

Post by Shrikrishna_Gad »

jacekm wrote: post #337
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 comp…

Dassault and Latecoere

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#400

Post by fastball »

kergonath wrote: post #265
fastball wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc. All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list i…

That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a s…

It's very relevant if any other EU firm can take open models (regardless of provenance) and fine tune them in the same way. Mistral really needs to be producing at-or-near SOTA models for them to be differentiated at all, and they are not.
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