See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral • Hacker News Board

Re: See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral

#61

Post by whiplash451 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

user_named wrote: post #55

Shrezzing wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems to me that it's the team + market that won the money. That's pretty much it. Most analysts expect there's an addressable market of $20bn this year, growing to $100bn per year by the end of the decade. The market will be split between four or five companies. The number of people globally with the required expertise to create these models is in the tens (generously one hundred individuals). Three of those peopl…

I don't at all believe the people able to build models are that few. Aren't tons of people doing open source models already? I believe the number of people who have already built models to be low, but the number of people with the capability to build models to be very large. It's not magic.

The number of people who can actually pre-train a true LLM is very small.

It remains a major feat with many tweaks and tricks. Case in point: the 114 pages of OPT175B logbook [1]

[1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/blob/main/projec...

Re: See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral

#62

Post by whiplash451 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

Mistral is getting a fair amount of bad press and unfair criticism. As an EU citizen, I am glad to see this initiative.

I am worried by a couple things, however:

- their market is not EU, but France: soon enough, UK and Germany will have their own Mistral. Each will have trivial access to their country's market (if only through politic backing) but accessing the neighbor's market will be an uphill battle.

- they are just helping EU play catch-up, not be at the forefront. Like sama said in a recent tweet: "the most special thing about openai is the culture of repeatable innovation. it is relatively easy to copy something; it’s hard to do something for the first time. it’s really hard to do many things for the first time!" [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1663983687241744393?s=20

Re: See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral

#63

Post by whiplash451 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 1:26 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #51

ToJans wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so they're aiming for a more "spray & pray" kind of GTM, challenging the incumbents based on the premise that it'll be EU based. This basically then boils down to: "ChatGPT got x users in a week, and we want to do the same for EU.", without a clear path to profitability or guarantees. So it's effectively a humongously risky bet by EU VCs?

> without a clear path to profitability or guarantees. I mean, ^ describes literally all "AI" VC activity, surely? It is, currently, all speculation.

VCs keep lecturing candidates on making sure that they have paying customers on the radar from day one, so no, that does not look like a reasonable VC bet.

Re: See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral

#64

Post by littlestymaar » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #57

littlestymaar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it very funny when Americans say things like that Salut, I'm definitely French ;)

Lol. Well, I am sad to say that America is not that much better than your country on this count.

It's a surprise to no one that the US politics is a shit show, but for this particular issue I think it's much more pronounced in French politics than in the US: We have both our President and Prime minister who've been doing back-and-forth between politics and executive positions in the private sector, and a handful of ministers (Catherine Colonna, Stanislas Guerini, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra) are in the same boat.