Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML • Hacker News Board

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#91

Post by amelius » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:14 AM UTC

DrPhish wrote: post #38

ojosilva wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny! OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the…

Model back doors feel like baseless fearmongering. Something like https://rentry.org/IsolatedLinuxWebService should provide a good guarantee of privacy and security.

But what if the model is used to write parts of the kernel?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#92

Post by pembrook » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

decide1000 wrote: post #25

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.

All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool.

Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse.

I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI.

But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#93

Post by 0x008 » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

mosselman wrote: post #77

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

All openAI models are available in the EU landing zones of Azure, run by Microsoft EU subsidiaries and in EU datacenters. Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“, there is no advantage here for Mistral.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#94

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:16 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #87

mosselman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]). Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspec…

[deleted]

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#95

Post by cloudify » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:17 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #87

mosselman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]). Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspec…

Due to the Cloud Act, hosting "In the EU through a US company" and "In the EU through an EU company" are two very different things.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#96

Post by miki123211 » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:17 AM UTC

kaliqt wrote: post #85

portaouflop wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?

Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.

> It's not like the model can spy on you

Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#97

Post by abdellah123 » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:19 AM UTC

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

good luck with hosting, inferencing at scale ! Mistral provides support !

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#98

Post by 0x008 » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:20 AM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #24

greyb wrote: post #3

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the proliferation of open frontier models. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see a path forward for Mistral at this point, given how far they're behind and their overall lack of competitive advantages for an AI Lab like access to hardware, cheap energy or a mas…

Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny! OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the…

Do you have any examples of such backdoors or research papers which explain how that would work?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#99

Post by gavmor » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:21 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #58

This doesn't make sense to me - I mean it'd OK for Mistral to make AI chips - but ASML doesn't do that, they make photolitography equipment.

ASML is not a maker of AI chips directly, no, but its photolithography equipment is essential for producing chips, so there are some not-too-distant synergies to exploit, no?

Re: Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

#100

Post by juliushuijnk » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 9:22 AM UTC

0x008 wrote: post #93

mosselman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.

All openAI models are available in the EU landing zones of Azure, run by Microsoft EU subsidiaries and in EU datacenters. Other than an irrational fear of them „phoning home“, there is no advantage here for Mistral.

If trump orders the CEO of Microsoft or OpenAI to hand over data to get dirt (or company secrets) on an opponent in the EU. What do you think are the odds they would do it? Zero?

In case you missed it, trust has been broken.