That's... not that much money. Anthropic's supposedly worth $380 billion.
And on secondary markets shares are trading for at least twice that...
Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
81–90 of 187 posts
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#82These 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.
This is changing somehow. At least on a surface. For example Amazon have created European subsidiary completely managed by Europeans under European company thus under it's local jurisdiction.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#83Earlier 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…
Let me rephrase this: companies want to avoid breaking the law unknowingly, because their US providers are going to break the law without notice, willingly or unwillingly.
Plenty of corporations are willing to break the rules, but never for free.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#84I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offeri…
Mistral models are definitely good enough. Most people fall for what I call the SOTA Logical Fallacy: whenever there is a 'better model', they think they need to use it, when less-powerful models actually perform the same tasks just as well. (it's an inverse form of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome: every time a new model comes out, people shift their baseline of what is acceptable, despite the fact that a previous baseline was acceptable for the same task)
Devstral Small 2 was (and remains) a particularly strong small coding model, even beating larger open weights. Mistral's "problem" is marketing; other providers ship model updates constantly so they remain in the news and seem like they're "beating" the competition. And it works: people get emotionally attached to brands and models, deciding who's better in the court of popular opinion, and that drives their choices (& dollars).
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. Thats true right up until you’re working with confidential info in a corporate context. Then it’s a multi month cross discipline cross jurisdiction project not an edit in a config file.
L O C A L M O D E L S All data stays on computers that you control. Same API. Localhost.
Try Mistral-Nemo-2407-12B-Thinking-Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2-Uncensored-HERETIC_Q4_k_m.gguf. This 7.5GB model runs well in llama.cpp on my 2021 Macbook Pro and is good at both coding and business document analysis tasks.
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#86Not being American is very important to me and my partner. For my next job, I'm looking exclusively at companies headquartered in the PRC. My partner and I formally registered ourselves as foreign agents of the PRC. While we did that, the NSA actually took down the entire DOJ filing site for this just to further obstruct us, in the end we had to register with the Attorney General by email, persuant to U.S. law.[1]
Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote:
"At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”"
This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts.
[1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht...
[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#87Earlier 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…
> companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law
This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda."
(Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#88In 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…
> At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term.
This is a pretty naive and innocent take. There is good reasons to why customers might continue to find value in Mistral A.I.
(1) - There is no particular reason why "European" model should be worst than "Chinese" one. GDPR restrictions are not such a big deal and have been made lighter recently [1]. And contrary to China, Europe is not under hardware embargo.
(2) - Most domains are not software engineering and do not need ultra advanced and extremely large models with complex agent setup to reach their optimum in term of A.I usage.
(3) - At the opposite, there is pretty good reasons why companies would want to use European operators with the current geopolitical context (e.g Cloud Act, Risk of data leaks, Regulations, Taxes, Reputation, Geo-political risk, ...).
[1]: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/digital-packag...
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#89It will be interesting if Mistral succeeds to keep up with US and Chinese labs in terms of Models, or if they just become an integration company of chinese OSS frontier labs, like more and more of their competitors
Re: Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American
#90Any recent news or data on NSA running a MITM at DE-CIX?