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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

#411

Post by jeroenhd »

yvoschaap wrote: post #101
robertlagrant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what it would cost Apple to recreate ASML.

Ask China, they've been trying for a decade.

Thanks to a combination of espionage and homegrown Chinese technology advancements, they went from "decades behind" to "years behind" quite rapidly on several critical parts of the chip manufacturing process.

China isn't quite there yet, but they will catch up. The question then becomes whether China can surpass the west or if they're stuck in lock-step behind us.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#412

Post by frikskit »

saubeidl wrote: post #313
doctaj wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From context, I doubt they are saying that Europe has zero innovation — they’re likely trying to complain about current rules and regulations stifling innovation and progress today . No one thinks Europe has done nothing worthwhile, ever…

That too, is nonsense. The EU produces 18% of the world's scientific paper's compared to 12% for the US [0] [0] https://ec.europa.eu/assets/rtd/srip/2024/ec_rtd_srip-report... Figure 3.1

Are the papers useful/impactful or does the EU just blindly throw money at scammers with PhDs?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#413

Post by rldjbpin »

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 recall them being one of the first ones to release a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model [1], which was quite novel at the time. post that, it has appeared to be a catch-up game for them in mainstream utility. like just a week go they announced support for custom MCP connectors to their chat offering [2].

more competition is always nice, but i wonder what can these two companies, separated by several steps in the supply chain, really achieve together.

[1] https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts [2] https://mistral.ai/news/le-chat-mcp-connectors-memories

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#414

Post by FirmwareBurner »

qnpnp wrote: post #409
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would have to change for you to consider it a country? For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians. And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people…

> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians. That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?

Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?

My point was that accountable democracy requires direct vote from the people and not via second hand, not that Germany or Italy aren't countries. And if EU wishes to be a country it needs that level of direct accountability which is impossible.

Otherwise if you force it it's gonna be another Yugoslavia or USSR where most people are pissed because they're not being ruled by someone of their own culture that they can directly vote for.

These forced multi-culti nation states under one roof abominations don't work. It's been known since the Tower of Babel yet the elite ruling class think this time it will be different because it worked in the US, a country younger than most universities in Europe.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#415

Post by maeln »

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"?

Yeah sorry, mistakes on my part, I meant to say it is an amount that ASML can afford to lose

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#416

Post by maeln »

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…

I am from the E.U :) . I also work for public administrations and have close relative working for E.U administrations, so I do have some knowledge about how the beast operate.

> The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country

Indeed, except when they do. While the various E.U administrations like to usually create funds that are distributed with grants (which are rarely evenly distributed evenly amongst the member mind you), there is sometime where they do invest in one horse. This is usually in high-tech, high-capital sector tho', like Airbus, Arianespace, where there is only a very few competitor, and the chance of having new one is very low has the investment in time and money to get a business up and running would be basically only feasible by a state.

So I don't think Mistral is that (yet at least). But it is still the only company operating at this level in the E.U (for now), making it a decent bet for ASML. Plus, as many pointed out, there is also the French connection :D

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#417

Post by bytesandbits »

darkamaul wrote: post #4

I 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.

Mistral needs a looooooot of GPUs. GPUs are made by Nvidia. Nvidia asks TSMC to make more. TSMC needs new lines to produce. TSMC acquires more machines to make new lines. TSMC buys from the only monopoly that has those machines. ASML. Now ASML happy, each machine costs 100s of millions, ASML makes back money.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#419

Post by littlestymaar »

qnpnp wrote: post #409
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would have to change for you to consider it a country? For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians. And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people…

> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians. That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?

> That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either

At least, it's usually the leader of the party the people voted for in the legislative elections.

In the EU there was this Spitzenkandidat idea floating around ten years ago, but it was never enacted in texts and died at the first opportunity (naming Von der Leyen back in 2019 when she wasn't the leader of the PPE), because the heads of members states (particularly the French) weren't willing to give up their designation power.

In practice there isn't even European political parties, the European elections are just national elections represented by national parties and most citizens don't even know the names of the European coalition of parties (PSOE, PPE, Renew, etc…).

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#420

Post by arnaudsm »

thatsadude wrote: post #396

Bad investment IMHO. Mistral was started by people who cheated on benchmarks with their Llama 1. It showed as they had the head start but fell far behind Gemini, DeepSeek and Qwen teams.

Are you referring to the llama 4 cheating ? I cannot find any reference to llama 1 cheating
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