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Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

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Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#61

Post by [deleted] »

joe_mamba wrote: post #53
askonomm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#62

Post by Lalabadie »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

In 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…

> If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work.

Well, you're pointing out a dissonance in a common AI (stock) booster argument: What if the hardware has lasting power?

If it does, then a company like Mistral can buy their capacity once from Nvidia (as in, once for each unit of capacity), then use it for a sustainable amount of time. No one forces them to scale beyond what's useful to the company and a mature user base. Provider dependence fades over time. That's a problem with Nvidia's current valuation.

If hardware doesn't last over that time, then the amount of cash invested in data center hardware can't really be reconciled with the expected revenue of running them at scale, and these projects are bound to run at a deficit over too long for them to be sustainable. That's a problem with Nvidia's valuation.

With independence as a target, Mistral can pretty safely bet on the former scenario, and then prepare for a future with either a mature market of diversified hardware providers, or innovations in quality and capacity for hardware they already have.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#64

Post by watwut »

joe_mamba wrote: post #53
askonomm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law.

So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#65

Post by snek_case »

vidarh wrote: post #48
aurareturn wrote: post #5

In 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…

Unless/until there is a risk that the chips themselves are backdoored and trying to exfiltrate data, European companies that host in Europe still solve a big problem for use of certain data in Europe. It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.

Sure, but it's probably not that easy to exfiltrate multi-terabyte datasets without being detected.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#66

Post by jgwil2 »

watwut wrote: post #64
joe_mamba wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yes, European companies break the law too. However, the comment this was about literally mocked the companies that are actively trying to follow the law. So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.

That comment mocked German customers; it didn't mention companies at all.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#67

Post by dd8601fn »

vidarh wrote: post #48
aurareturn wrote: post #5

In 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…

Unless/until there is a risk that the chips themselves are backdoored and trying to exfiltrate data, European companies that host in Europe still solve a big problem for use of certain data in Europe. It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.

Out of curiosity, how does a chip that does inference calculations exfiltrate data without being seen?

Has this happened already or is it just conceptually possible?

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#68

Post by bachmeier »

enaaem wrote: post #51

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.

I expect AI to become more like the news, where every country has their own news services, rather than the global monopoly Sam Altman had envisioned. We even see it with Meta, a company that doesn't sell AI. They'd rather build their own models than let one or a few companies have that much leverage over them. This is why it's unlikely open models will disappear. That's the only thing that prevents a global AI oligopoly.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#69

Post by esafak »

joe_mamba wrote: post #53
askonomm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Europe, those are scandals. In the US, it's another Tuesday.

Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

#70

Post by tom1337890 »

I follow Mistral AI and especially liked their voice Model voxtral, which is supposed to be better than whisper. So while the LLM can maybe not compete, they do compete in voice. [1]

I think these kind of special use cases matter a lot for people who want to build special software. Voice for example is not yet that uniformly accessible as LLMs. So once you chose one provider you're more tighty coupled. Plus, handling voice is more sensitive by nature, so guess at least for European companies building something with voice, Mistral is the go-to company now.

Also, running voxtral yourself is not that straight forward as of now, so relying on their inference makes sense.

1: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral

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