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Mistral raises €3B

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral raises €3B

#441

Post by barrenko »

mondrian wrote: post #124
HenrikPontoppid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as we…

Europe is a different beast. They build and distribute rails, they don’t compete on frontier capabilities. When the civic benefits of AI become clear, EU is in a position to mandate their distribution. US develops capabilities that remain stuck in heterogeneous corporate silos without interop. Payments is a good point of comparisons between the two approaches.

A new ICE line between Antwerpen and Koln opened up the last week. The first train was half an hour late, the distance is under 250 km.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#442

Post by intended »

nickpp wrote: post #432
intended wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction. It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion. Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale. The point is that regulation…

> If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring. Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care. Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.

> Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.

> Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.

Financial markets are highly regulated. They are one of the most structured markets out there.

The outcomes in all those markets, whether they are good or bad, is a direct result of how the markets are structured.

The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was a direct result of regulators being defanged and underfunded for multiple years.

If you look at technology: innovation amazing in the era of unlimited horizons, the era of "move fast and break things."

However, the cost of externalities from inventions like social media, were not captured in that market structure. This means that firms can absolutely pollute or addict people in the information economy, capturing the profit but socializing the costs.

The ability of dominant players to consume/acquihire upstarts and keep their market position, is a drag on innovation and consumer outcomes today.

The situation that was faced in the early days of a new technology is different than what is faced in its maturity, when the advantages of the nimble upstart give way to the massive overlord.

At each stage, you have to craft the incentives and rules to ensure you achieve the outcomes you (as a nation) actually priortize.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#443

Post by swiftcoder »

chrocni380 wrote: post #284
swiftcoder wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/ Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage? Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower…

> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage? Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE. Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back. Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, E…

> Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that you have a decent software job in the Bay Area, so you earn somewhere in the region of $350k. That little 4 month stint earns you just $116k (since quitting after 4 months means you'll have to return any signing bonus).

Now in the Bay Area your median mortgage is around $3,500/month, so with modest living expenses we're talking a burn of about $5,500/month, meaning you need to spend about $66,000 to cover the year. Plus $17,000 in state and federal taxes, you're now down to a cushion of 33k/year.

That's assuming, of course, that you are happy sending your kids to public school in a dodgy district (private school fees alone would wipe you out, as would the mortgages in a good public school district).

The math doesn't math here chief

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#444

Post by barrenko »

moffkalast wrote: post #311
donmb wrote: post #35

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

"Do nothing, win." is already China's strategy after all. Though they are far from doing nothing in the LLM space.

Europe is not China, I repeat we are not China, they build stuff. A guy from Austria ended up on Chinese national TV due to the bizarre way he had to obtain an AC unit this summer. Let's stop the larp.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#445

Post by barrenko »

petcat wrote: post #395

EU is in a precarious situation with Mistral. If you look at their investor sheet, it's primarily American and other foreign investors with some token amount coming from within the EU. It seems like this is positioning as an acquisition play, most likely by a foreign AI tech firm. We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and cap…

" And it will most likely end up as an acquisition." if they were really a thread, OAI / Anthropic would probably have swallowed them up by now, they're just going to go a decade as a EU zombie consultancy.

I hope I'm wrong here.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#446

Post by barrenko »

My dudes, the EU doesn't have enough gas to survive the following winter, let alone if Poutine decides to go around Ukraine and test NATO in production.

Mistral is the cherry on the sundae of our concerns. It's a spiritual thing.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#447

Post by intended »

nickpp wrote: post #200
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.

Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore. I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.

But Boeing and Airbus kept desiging and building new and improved planes.

There are multiple aircraft manufacturers for smaller aircraft, and there are several showing up for electric aircraft today.

For jets, the capex required to build them is massive, and its never going to have an upstart just up and build a jet.

The regulations in place are the reason why its safe to fly, and airlines have the safety records they do.

This is the degree of safety end consumers want to be reassured that its safe to fly. The checks and balances in places create the market that you are hoping to give over to cheaper upstarts.

The market doesn't exist without that safety regulation.

See how people feel uneasy when flying Boeing after the decay of their engineering and quality culture became public knowledge.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#448

Post by tsimionescu »

HenrikPontoppid wrote: post #47
donmb wrote: post #35

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as we…

> any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.

This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#449

Post by websap »

davedx wrote: post #45

Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

Sounds more like regulatory capture, than building state of art sovereign models.

Re: Mistral raises €3B

#450

Post by vasco »

wraptile wrote: post #313
TheJCDenton wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser t…

Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?
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