It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.
Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#52I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money. These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
> $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money
Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations.
Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have a few more picky customers in Germany. Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have. Though, if th…
>Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law
Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#54These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compli…
> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.
We should forbid that if customer PII is involved
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#55> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it. Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are ac…
> in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris
> actually in the 2nd
The mixup is easily explainable: machines write numbers in binary notation!
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#56In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an…
It's also naïve.
This is the same Europe that is gladly mandating age verification for citizens accessing online services, and that is made up of countries that routinely censor speech. There's also a variety of values that make up pan-European politics, both from a national and ideological perspective, that could make these efforts fracture.
If the idea is to not be subject to foreign pressure, maybe there's a short-term argument to be made for this, but like you say, they'll still be vulnerable to hardware imports, which is arguably the main vulnerability.
If the idea is to protect human rights on the continent, this does nothing.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
For Mideastern countries, it is paying off. For European countries, remains to be seen
I can't think of a place on Earth less blessed by "not American" than the Middle East.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#58I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money. These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
> $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations. Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
How would that work? What it means for the US AI bubble to burst is that tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar. I don't see how Mistral is or could be sheltered from that.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#59LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'. Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones? I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the gl…
Interesting that you mention commodity, because the better AI models become the more fungible they are. AI companies become like web hosting companies renting out server space with good enough open models. It’s not like Excel that runs the world economy because people don’t want to learn anything else.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#60I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/ I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that sp…
There's pretty good consumer protection in the EU. I imagine consumer protection routes probably would apply here. Definitely not really acceptable though nonetheless; you're a paying customer / subscriber that got 'scammed'...
From the perspective of the company he was scamming them by not paying for a previously agreed service.
> Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background
Sounds like this is a scheme against customers that GP fell for.
Are you claiming for the following months that you paid they denied access? That would be against laws afaik