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davedx 8 hours ago [-]
Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
TheJCDenton 7 hours ago [-]
When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
The two companies have read the market the same.
It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
riffraff 7 hours ago [-]
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.
Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
buran77 11 minutes ago [-]
Mistral is doing one more thing: building up local know-how in the European ecosystem. This is worth more than money, you can't bootstrap an industry overnight.
samtheprogram 22 minutes ago [-]
> go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights
If you know Apple's history, this should stand out to you.
madeofpalk 5 hours ago [-]
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
leoc 2 hours ago [-]
Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.
moffkalast 6 hours ago [-]
Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?
rapind 29 minutes ago [-]
I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models.
I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.
It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.
etiennebausson 6 hours ago [-]
Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start.
They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
andy99 3 hours ago [-]
What’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?)
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
simonask 2 hours ago [-]
> In the event of some schism …
In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened.
Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable if they hadn’t had a whole continent of wealthy customers, and no competition.
I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.
celsoazevedo 10 minutes ago [-]
Early this year I was thinking "will I still have access to this service if they invade Greenland?"
Never had to do it before. That's how much it has changed.
mhaberl 2 hours ago [-]
2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough
1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap
2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability.
Most deployments don't need AGI
In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it.
Example:
Case of a hospital flooded in emails.
You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest.
If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance
Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"
andy99 58 minutes ago [-]
Agree benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. A better and easier evaluation of capability is whether anyone is using it for anything.
Does Mistral have material market share for any application, including anything that would fall under item 2 above?
rapind 14 minutes ago [-]
China's model for decades has been to do it cheaper and then do it better for cheaper. Just accepting this makes you an economic vassal state. We've seen this play out over decades now with other industries. I'm not blaming China for this approach, but if you want to stay relevant, then you need to compete.
You don't need to view China as some scary boogeyman who's going to use AI to attack you or w/e the current conspiracy is. They just need to continue peacefully outperforming while everyone else gets fat and lazy.
radicalbyte 1 hours ago [-]
The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it.
Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do.
But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely.
I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security.
But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having.
This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
vrganj 42 minutes ago [-]
Any model, even an open weight one, is fundamentally an encoding of a way of viewing the world.
What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.
Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.
I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default and that's why the sovereign part is important.
andy99 25 minutes ago [-]
Is there a specific concern you have, and what kind of performance penalty is it worth to you on say coding tasks?
Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competitive but has this alignment is the solution, rather than accepting an inferior one.
5 hours ago [-]
radicalbyte 1 hours ago [-]
Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?
From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?
I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
wraptile 5 hours ago [-]
Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.
jackgavigan 2 hours ago [-]
> ..but you're comparing apples to oranges.
Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals.
I’ll get my coat.
vasco 1 hours ago [-]
Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?
ta20240528 5 hours ago [-]
"What does Mistral own?"
Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*
*…and the Chinese equivalents.
wraptile 5 hours ago [-]
Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.
ta20240528 4 hours ago [-]
The wording of the CLOUD act prevents any American company from competing, but yes, other European-only companies could offer the same.
r_lee 3 hours ago [-]
Apple is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison
2 hours ago [-]
serbuvlad 4 hours ago [-]
Apple and Mistral are not in the same market.
Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.
Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).
Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.
TheJCDenton 6 hours ago [-]
They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading.
Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.
Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.
whywhywhywhy 3 hours ago [-]
It's a mistake when Apple does it too, they're back in the same situation they were with Google Maps in the early iPhone days.
ywvcbk 7 hours ago [-]
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
niltecedu 6 hours ago [-]
One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.
WhereIsTheTruth 5 hours ago [-]
One is american, the other is european
It's the same with gaming
When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"
Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
PunchyHamster 3 hours ago [-]
> When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"
Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
alephnan 3 hours ago [-]
Well Microsoft’s PR machine is working overtime then because I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft doing this until this HN thread whereas Sony was everywhere on social media
ACCount37 5 hours ago [-]
Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.
In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
dbspin 40 minutes ago [-]
They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.
elAhmo 6 hours ago [-]
Apple is a hardware company.
PunchyHamster 3 hours ago [-]
Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM.
Which is smart move
ulfw 6 hours ago [-]
AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies
r4rf 2 hours ago [-]
Lmao imagine saying Mistral and Apple are in the same position.. wtf.
hkt 6 hours ago [-]
I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.
philipallstar 6 hours ago [-]
They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
toyg 6 hours ago [-]
That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
philipallstar 6 hours ago [-]
True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
noir_lord 6 hours ago [-]
If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts.
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
TacticalCoder 6 hours ago [-]
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?
In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.
pembrook 7 hours ago [-]
Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.
Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.
Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.
alexfortin 8 hours ago [-]
I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently).
First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).
I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.
I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.
ywvcbk 7 hours ago [-]
> once they're good enough for coding aid
The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
maxhille 3 hours ago [-]
They are now serving GLM52 and the 15€ sub comes with a nice included quota. So I get good code assist and pay a EU company for it.
blfr 7 hours ago [-]
I don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.
But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.
zorked 7 hours ago [-]
People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.
piyush_patel_ha 6 hours ago [-]
A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.
antupis 6 hours ago [-]
Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.
nananana9 5 hours ago [-]
When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.
blfr 7 hours ago [-]
It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
Lapel2742 7 hours ago [-]
> Fable was the step change for programming.
AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:
> During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.
> Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.
nicce 6 hours ago [-]
>> Fable was the step change for programming
> AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field.
They have released models speficially for programming that ”vibe coding” would be safer.
People said this for Opus 4.6 too. Every release the models get RLHF'ed into accomplishing a new task and the people who need to do this task think there was a step change.
ifwinterco 7 hours ago [-]
To be fair Opus 4.6 was genuinely a really good model when it came out, in fact I'm not sure Opus 5 is even any better.
It's definitely a lot slower, though
slopinthebag 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though.
There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.
ifwinterco 4 hours ago [-]
Yep same with latest Claude models - code isn't really any better than Opus 4.5/4.6, but use 5x as many tokens doing random stuff that's mostly unnecessary.
And yeah still for some reason they often can't understand how to set up any project locally without handholding, which is something you'd think an LLM would actually be good at
raverbashing 7 hours ago [-]
If the choice is between Mistral and no AI, I'll take Mistral any day
Even those old llama models were ok for coding
Yes yes they won't be like Claude's fire and forget (until you see how many tokens you burned to write "Hello World")
mdp2021 7 hours ago [-]
> don't care about benchmarks
You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).
tripledry 6 hours ago [-]
Genuinely interested, which ones do you think have relevance?
If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.
dwedge 8 hours ago [-]
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
pavlov 7 hours ago [-]
After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.
My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).
When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and
Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.
ywvcbk 7 hours ago [-]
There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
moffkalast 5 hours ago [-]
Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.
dwedge 7 hours ago [-]
Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good
stanac 7 hours ago [-]
Didn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....
notahacker 6 hours ago [-]
They've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...
Aeolos 7 hours ago [-]
Did you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?
eloisant 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.
oblio 7 hours ago [-]
Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)".
Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
jryle70 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, "Americans are awful. Now we can be just awful"
> they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
So I guess Anthropic called for banning Chinese models when they said "but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."? - [0]
May be they imply it? They work behind the scene for it? well, who knows. My guess is as good as yours. But since we're acting like a child, bending the truth is allowed?
By the way, China is decisive. They just banned outright Claude and Open AI. I guess no open arguments about regulation is good?
> I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.
I'm all for following positive examples, as long as we keep democracy. We don't need to copy everything, just the good parts.
BoredomIsFun 5 hours ago [-]
> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
Regulation != censorship. (Apart from that, Mistral has Shieldstral[0] for adding policy enforcement).
With it's general approach of Open Weights, and being able to be deployed on-premise (/private/public cloud), they are a viable solution for your typical European enterprise, that has to comply with traditional (non-AI) regulation. With the NIS2 directive the amount of those companies is also significantly expanding.
We[1] are in the same market as Mistral, and among our customers, the go-to-solution of MS Copilot is typically performing badly, and the typical SaaS solutions are not even given a consideration, which is why they are reaching for on-premise-first solutions.
This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.
davedx 3 hours ago [-]
Don't make me laugh. Who has actually sat in Congress and told congress leaders to push regulatory capture?
Not Mistral
dns_snek 7 hours ago [-]
Which provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?
intended 8 hours ago [-]
It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.
Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.
To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.
ywvcbk 7 hours ago [-]
> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
21asdffdsa12 8 hours ago [-]
And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
nickpp 7 hours ago [-]
Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore.
I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
notahacker 6 hours ago [-]
> I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...
intended 2 hours ago [-]
But Boeing and Airbus kept desiging and building new and improved planes.
There are multiple aircraft manufacturers for smaller aircraft, and there are several showing up for electric aircraft today.
For jets, the capex required to build them is massive, and its never going to have an upstart just up and build a jet.
The regulations in place are the reason why its safe to fly, and airlines have the safety records they do.
This is the degree of safety end consumers want to be reassured that its safe to fly. The checks and balances in places create the market that you are hoping to give over to cheaper upstarts.
The market doesn't exist without that safety regulation.
See how people feel uneasy when flying Boeing after the decay of their engineering and quality culture became public knowledge.
nickpp 7 hours ago [-]
And it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.
dns_snek 5 hours ago [-]
That's not true. EU regulations like the AI Act and Digital Services Act have different obligations and requirements for large and small businesses and that amount can't be zero because being a small business doesn't give you a free pass to cause damage to society.
I'd be curious to hear about specific examples of AI regulation that affect small businesses without a good reason.
nickpp 2 hours ago [-]
> regulation [...] is not free
> that amount can't be zero because
Sounds like you're agreeing with my point.
dns_snek 31 minutes ago [-]
Not having regulation is also "not free" because it imposes external costs on the rest of society. The goal of regulation is to reduce these external costs and instead impose them on the people (broadly) responsible.
intended 6 hours ago [-]
Yes.
This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.
It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.
Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.
The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.
Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.
This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.
If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
nickpp 2 hours ago [-]
> If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.
Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
intended 2 hours ago [-]
> Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.
> Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
Financial markets are highly regulated. They are one of the most structured markets out there.
The outcomes in all those markets, whether they are good or bad, is a direct result of how the markets are structured.
The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was a direct result of regulators being defanged and underfunded for multiple years.
If you look at technology: innovation amazing in the era of unlimited horizons, the era of "move fast and break things."
However, the cost of externalities from inventions like social media, were not captured in that market structure. This means that firms can absolutely pollute or addict people in the information economy, capturing the profit but socializing the costs.
The ability of dominant players to consume/acquihire upstarts and keep their market position, is a drag on innovation and consumer outcomes today.
The situation that was faced in the early days of a new technology is different than what is faced in its maturity, when the advantages of the nimble upstart give way to the massive overlord.
At each stage, you have to craft the incentives and rules to ensure you achieve the outcomes you (as a nation) actually priortize.
blfr 7 hours ago [-]
Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.
I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.
vichle 7 hours ago [-]
They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.
blfr 7 hours ago [-]
Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.
t43562 4 hours ago [-]
These are effective monopolies competing to become super monopolies - the period leading up to dominance by one or two is beneficial to consumers with freebies and cheap offers that also completely lock out any smaller players.
If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
prolly97 8 hours ago [-]
There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers.
Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.
boonzeet 7 hours ago [-]
There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to:
Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases
Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods
Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts
Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising
Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial)
The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.
ricardobayes 7 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad.
We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.
Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
prolly97 5 hours ago [-]
>Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago
I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
Awesome!
But, looking at the numbers the decrease in totals are due to fewer registered "street crimes", less fraud and legalization of cannabis (removing a 183k comparable from 2016).
Violent crimes however went from 193,542 to 212,335. With rapes almost doubling, going from 7,919 to 14,454 (82%). Murders remained stable though.
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem.
I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nickpp 7 hours ago [-]
> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair
Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.
Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.
But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".
It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
lentil_soup 4 hours ago [-]
> But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not
that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not just a race to the bottom. The idea of a free for all market is an utopia that doesn't exist ... thankfully.
prolly97 2 hours ago [-]
He's stating a fact that you don't dispute.
You follow up with hyperbolic language; "eating rotten food" (as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety).
In a market that has been designed to let people take part in voluntary transactions, we also design methods for making sure that the counterpart takes responsibility, and delivers the agreed amount quality of product.
If you purchase a car that won't turn on, you're in your good right to make a claim against the producer. Same for all the other things you mention. And people do.
You're making a point about negative externalities. Agreed that a factory shouldn't just be able to poison a river, because there's no tangible cost to piping your dirty water to one. Here it makes sense to make artificial interventions, in my opinion.
lentil_soup 1 hours ago [-]
I never tried to dispute the fact, I'm disputing the idea that we should be free to opt out of benefits that have been agreed as the minimum requirements to do business in a society. I would actually go further and argue that allowing that freedom would lead to everyone being worse off. Having minimum standards in a society gives a solid foundation on which to build, can't think of any society that doesn't have them.
A way more interesting conversation would be where to regulate, how much, for how long, what impacts would it have in innovation, etc not that I want to be free to get sold broken goods.
> as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety
How would you know they disregard food safety if there's no regulation on what food safety means?
intended 3 hours ago [-]
That... that is not exactly how things work.
The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.
You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.
The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.
The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.
Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.
prolly97 5 hours ago [-]
This!!!
I went to California earlier this year.
In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be.
It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good.
It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.
I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
boonzeet 3 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure that’s a function of regulation but more a function of most modern freezers defaulting to -18°, where an American or industrial freezer is -22 to -28°C.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
prolly97 2 hours ago [-]
haha, yes, this is 100% just me overfitting then!
And it's not as if there aren't a bunch of somewhat arbitrary regulation in the US either.
But the general sense I got from the US, was that people still feel agency to improve their reality, and that there's fewer artificial barriers to that end.
(Except for building houses in California. omg. That sounds like a horrible horrible process. At least for those I spoke to).
pdhborges 7 hours ago [-]
Do you believe I can't get a list of 20 effective pro-consumer regulations drafted by the EU out of Gemini?
prolly97 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith.
I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.
Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
nickpp 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe you should get that list from the European AI products that came from those awesome EU regulations.
vrganj 7 hours ago [-]
That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here.
As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.
You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)
prolly97 5 hours ago [-]
Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions?
Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another.
Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head.
Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.
I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it.
I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.
dns_snek 4 hours ago [-]
> (48) The extent of the adverse impact caused by the AI system on the fundamental rights protected by the Charter is of particular relevance when classifying an AI system as high risk. Those rights include the right to human dignity, respect for private and family life, protection of personal data, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and of association, the right to non-discrimination, the right to education, consumer protection, workers’ rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, intellectual property rights, the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the right of defence and the presumption of innocence, and the right to good administration. [...]
> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,
> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.
> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy
I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.
They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy.
Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.
bsoqk 6 hours ago [-]
>They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons.
We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out.
It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place.
Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".
matusp 8 hours ago [-]
This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.
black_puppydog 8 hours ago [-]
We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
randomgermanguy 8 hours ago [-]
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models.
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
oblio 7 hours ago [-]
I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something.
We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.
If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
nickpp 7 hours ago [-]
> I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
ezst 5 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs.
The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
nickpp 2 hours ago [-]
> all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children
Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
ezst 1 hours ago [-]
> Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.
oblio 33 minutes ago [-]
> Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even.
Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
oblio 6 hours ago [-]
We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated?
Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
selcuka 8 hours ago [-]
Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
matusp 5 hours ago [-]
How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.
realusername 8 hours ago [-]
That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore.
And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.
As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
adventured 5 hours ago [-]
Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market?
What moat does Google have that's so special in search?
You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.
When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.
Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.
Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
KronisLV 7 hours ago [-]
To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment.
I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.
At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.
NekkoDroid 4 hours ago [-]
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.
simgt 6 hours ago [-]
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
KronisLV 6 hours ago [-]
I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.
simgt 6 hours ago [-]
We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.
lII1lIlI11ll 5 hours ago [-]
> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.
You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.
gman83 7 hours ago [-]
No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
lII1lIlI11ll 5 hours ago [-]
> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:
- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).
- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.
- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.
gman83 2 hours ago [-]
Power is the easy part; the hard part is where the check comes from.
One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.
The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.
With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.
grim_io 6 hours ago [-]
There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US.
EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
pferde 5 hours ago [-]
No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.
grim_io 52 minutes ago [-]
What is the AI arms reace to you?
Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.
pferde 7 hours ago [-]
Thank god.
throw1234567891 7 hours ago [-]
you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?
Bayart 6 hours ago [-]
Mistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise.
Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.
dzonga 7 hours ago [-]
I also think their business model is interesting in that they can also serve Chinese models e.g GLM and fine tune them for enterprises.
which is a market Chinese labs won't get into.
they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.
msh 3 hours ago [-]
I am European and would like European AI so I tried mistral this month.
Their own models seems like years old OpenAI models, hallucinations all over the place and coding was crazy slow.
I can only say two good things about them:
- their hosted glm model was fast
- because I canceled within 14 days they gave me a full refund.
redox99 3 hours ago [-]
Mistral models are way worse than Chinese models in the real world. It's not benchmarks.
websap 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds more like regulatory capture, than building state of art sovereign models.
tomaskafka 2 hours ago [-]
As a potential user, I want a competent model (the definition is shifting as the SOTA improves), but Mistral doesn’t seem to be that.
make3 2 hours ago [-]
Then your choice is either a US mega corp under the Trump partial dictatorship shitshow or a Chinese model distillation factory that could turn on you at any second.
I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.
ywvcbk 7 hours ago [-]
Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
jillesvangurp 6 hours ago [-]
There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.
The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.
Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.
You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
"something that will work reliably and predictably for years" is not really the class of product being sold, unless you're using a fine-tuned SLM to do something like classification. The vast majority of work being done with AI unfortunately benefits from being run on the biggest/best model.
HNIsAds 2 hours ago [-]
> People dump on them because
Because this forum is sponsored by Claude and Anslopic.
Anything against the narrative is attacked.
Used mistral 7b locally for years - it’s fine.
Their web version is like a slightly worse Gemini - also fine
catoc 7 hours ago [-]
With how they’re currently being used we might as well call them bendmarks.
Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.
Eldodi 5 hours ago [-]
Is it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well
mokre 6 hours ago [-]
How you know that they are not realy benchmaxxxing? Maybe they just have skill issue in this olimpics.
jatins 4 hours ago [-]
> clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs
What’s contrarian? Dont they also sell API and subscription like every other lab?
blackcat201 3 hours ago [-]
who says they aren't benchmaxxing?
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
> they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs.
Yeah, spot on.
I'd add they are also betting on building specialized AI's targeting narrow yet very profitable segment markets, where general AI's à la AnthroOpenAI don't work very well.
gvieri 7 hours ago [-]
I tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.
7 hours ago [-]
tonyhart7 7 hours ago [-]
are you saying current frontier AI labs is benchmaxxxing and not because the AI model is good ?????
You crazy to think that Fable and Astra capabilities is fake
ahartmetz 7 hours ago [-]
The winning strategy seems to be actual capabilities plus cheating.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.
Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
himata4113 8 hours ago [-]
Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
ulfw 6 hours ago [-]
LOL yea as if that was the reason for LLMs
21asdffdsa12 8 hours ago [-]
Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
mastermage 7 hours ago [-]
The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets.
Where in the fuck did we stall out?
21asdffdsa12 7 hours ago [-]
If life is a exponential curve, the moment we stopped overproducing exponential energy and ate the planet up for this.. that was when we stalled.
ulfw 6 hours ago [-]
Please speak English so that an LLM can understand you
smurf9852 3 hours ago [-]
I want an intelligent model, which Mistral does not have.
donmb 8 hours ago [-]
Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.
eloisant 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is that they're in a weird position between US models and Chinese models. Not as performant as US models, not as cheap as Chinese models.
Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant.
It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already hosting GLM) and (2) selling AI-related consultant service (they're also doing that already).
rich_sasha 3 hours ago [-]
I think Europe was at risk of being left without even a foot in the door. Mistral os one of few such feet. Just having some compute and know how for running Chinese models is better than nothing. Low bar I know but still. Who knows what R&D they’re doing while keeping the business running.
I’m not sure really what the winning strategy is in this weird arms race.
u8080 16 minutes ago [-]
No, they are just worse and more expensive then frontier chinese models
pembrook 7 hours ago [-]
If there’s one thing the legacy, dying industrial companies of Europe love, it’s consulting.
So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China.
Which would be the most European outcome ever.
Foobar8568 7 hours ago [-]
Not just legacy dying industry.
Whole IT in France and Switzerland runs on consultancy.
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 7 hours ago [-]
Add Italy please.
kiney 6 hours ago [-]
and Germany
chrystianpl 6 hours ago [-]
and Poland
hoihoihoi 5 hours ago [-]
Korea as well :)
hakunin 48 minutes ago [-]
I've made a personal doc tool based on Mistral OCR API at first, and then switched to Gemini Flash for the same price inline, or half price using batch API, and the difference is night and day. Mistral doesn't even come close on anything non-trivial. Longer story here: https://max.engineer/ringbinder
HenrikPontoppid 8 hours ago [-]
When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.
Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.
eloisant 7 hours ago [-]
> It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing
I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.
I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.
Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.
user43928 6 hours ago [-]
I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it.
Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers.
This is supposed to be a success story?
eloisant 6 hours ago [-]
I'm sure you can tell the difference.
But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough.
Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started.
Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments.
user43928 4 hours ago [-]
I suspect that opinions in that direction might be the result of a lack of ambition in applying agentic AI.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?
Slartie 3 hours ago [-]
You call it "lack of ambition", implying a certain arrogance; more humble people might just call it "a different sweet spot" of AI integration. After all, the goal in the end is not to use up as many AI tokens as possible, but the goal is to implement/perform a certain business case in the best way possible with regard to cost/speed/quality.
It's not like everyone using AI has the same software development cycle. It's not even that everyone using AI is developing software.
user43928 3 hours ago [-]
I propose that there is no such sweet spot.
If the model cannot perform the task with adequate quality while being many times faster and cheaper than a human, it is not good enough in my view.
If a SOTA model would be good enough, surely that would be preferable to a human using cheap AI assistance for a moderate efficiency improvement.
Slartie 1 hours ago [-]
A harness of limited capability is a component that doesn't exist in your proposal, right? Just like non-automatable or at least hard-to-automate things like physical actions to be performed in the real world as part of a business task do not exist, too? Same goes for coordination with other real humans - doesn't exist.
user43928 8 minutes ago [-]
Why don't you give some examples of tasks that you think fall into this category, where AI assistance only is the perfect solution and which could not conceivable be done more effectively autonomously by more capable models?
For coding, I don't see it.
Physical tasks? I don't know, it's not my area of expertise. I do not think AI is widely deployed for physical tasks yet, not even the SOTA is good enough.
tsimionescu 2 hours ago [-]
> any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.
This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.
powerapple 7 hours ago [-]
I don't get it when people all claim that AGI is a winner takes all game. It is not (unless it is used as a weapon). When one company reaches AGI, there will be a dozen very close to AGI, given time. Also a winner is not going to drive everyone else out of business, it is the opposite, one winner will have people betting on the second and the third winners, the technology will also help other develops. Once you have a good enough model, everything will be incremental. I think the hardware capability will be the real burden, not the model itself. If AGI is as powerful as it sounds, maybe hardware won't be a problem any more.
AureliusMA 6 hours ago [-]
It’s very possible that the people saying AGI is a winner takes all are indeed referring to warfare.
mondrian 7 hours ago [-]
Europe is a different beast. They build and distribute rails, they don’t compete on frontier capabilities. When the civic benefits of AI become clear, EU is in a position to mandate their distribution. US develops capabilities that remain stuck in heterogeneous corporate silos without interop. Payments is a good point of comparisons between the two approaches.
u8080 6 minutes ago [-]
also electronics, social networks and electric cars
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
A new ICE line between Antwerpen and Koln opened up the last week. The first train was half an hour late, the distance is under 250 km.
Slartie 8 hours ago [-]
Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait...
> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing
So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
> So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they?
They are simultaneously first: the two leapfrog each other with regularity, and are meaningfully ahead of the competition.
HenrikPontoppid 8 hours ago [-]
The value of these companies is not defined entirely by the state of their current models. A much more important signal is their chance of having the best model in the future. Just like with anything having to do with investment, this is the castle in the sky. Also, shame on me for simplifying things so much - but I still believe in my original sentiment.
gmueckl 6 hours ago [-]
Replce "best" with "most fit for purpose" and you're right. The future won't be a one size fits all kind of deal because hardware availability constraints will eventually punish oversized models even more.
I think that there's a real second mover advantage in letting others waste money on researching ultra oversized models while creating smaller and cheaper models from their learnings.
whiplash451 8 hours ago [-]
OpenAI and Anthropic are so close on benchmarks and release date that they are essentially ex-aequo at this point. The market is just hedging their bets.
There is no close second, because the AA Index points are expentially harder to get as you get closer to the first.
adventured 5 hours ago [-]
Samsung is now essentially tied for being the world's most profitable company with Nvidia ($62b operating profit last quarter, vs $63b for Nvidia). They're drowning in cash. They're doing the same thing Nvidia has been doing: distributing the money to their business partners, to try to drive business growth faster (and or to keep it all propped up).
Towaway69 8 hours ago [-]
> Europe is at least trying
Which is interesting since who are the investors and what exactly are their roles? Samsung - European? BlackRock - European? Salesforce Ventures - European? Etc.
So yes it might well be
> [...] the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch.
but the money isn't European.
BoredomIsFun 5 hours ago [-]
Mistral is odd. They have made mostly flops, boring models (Ministral 3, Mistral Small 4, Small 3, Small 3.1) together with a classic masterpiece Mistral Nemo and very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b, Mistral Small 3.2.
vintagedave 8 hours ago [-]
That's kinda damning with faint praise, but I agree, I am glad to see something. I've been disappointed in their coding ability -- it's where I'm most focused, I've built and we are selling a (specialised) coding agent -- and hopefully investment will give them the ability to achieve more in their research and model development.
They have been focusing largely on government and business not consumer, which is fine. Perhaps coding is not something they want to achieve, but they do provide Codestral. It's a signal it's a market of interest to them.
moffkalast 5 hours ago [-]
"Do nothing, win." is already China's strategy after all. Though they are far from doing nothing in the LLM space.
Slartie 4 hours ago [-]
China is actively tripping the US up by pushing the open-weight strategy, which is kind of smart. They realized that they obviously will not be able to make Western companies trust Chinese companies enough to just use proprietary models by sending all their data to services hosted by Chinese companies. The US is still able to attract this trust, although it's eroding quickly in spite of recent political events and the current trust is more or less a function of old habits that need some time to change. But China correctly found that - due to there being no old habits to piggyback on - they wouldn't ever be able to compete in this way, even if they had proprietary foundation models superior to their US counterparts, so they decided to throw sticks into the spokes of the US frontier labs by releasing top open-weight models worth billions of dollars in training cost and thereby devaluing the huge proprietary investments of the US labs.
That is absolutely not "do nothing".
applicative 3 hours ago [-]
Their ‘open weight strategy’ was invented, to Chinas surprise, by the Western press after the DeepSeek event. Of course all the actual systems like Baidu, Bytedance are closed weight and basically all anyone uses. Meanwhile the advanced system are crossing security frontiers: soon only inferior models will be ‘open’ (as with OpenAI, even) the rest closed. — Or where open weighted, they will be impossible to run without a private data center, come with absurd ‘security scrutiny’ licenses like GLM is starting — or licensing requiring a cut, as with Kimi, which is basically a scheme to get western companies to do buildout for them
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
Europe is not China, I repeat we are not China, they build stuff. A guy from Austria ended up on Chinese national TV due to the bizarre way he had to obtain an AC unit this summer. Let's stop the larp.
0xDEAFBEAD 8 hours ago [-]
Europe could tell ASML to put kill switches in GPUs so Europe has leverage to "safeguard" AI deployments in other countries.
orphereus 8 hours ago [-]
It couldn't tell ASML to do that because ASML doesn't do chip design.
Slartie 8 hours ago [-]
Ehm, sorry, but no, this is not how lithography works. You cannot "hide" functionality in circuitry your machines are producing if your machines' job is to shine light through a mask.
You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.
0xDEAFBEAD 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't say to hide it. My suggestion is to create international AI safety rules which companies must be in compliance with if they want to buy and service ASML machines.
tangled 8 hours ago [-]
Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.
So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
bambax 7 hours ago [-]
> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:
I don't know. Government funds have a unique way of being often wrong, so this may be the kiss of death. But it is a sign that the EU is helping Mistral.
guiriduro 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine the fund were distributing to several teams, but let's say Z.ai and Deepseek were european and among them. What percentage would be allocated to Mistral in that case? OK, the other two aren't, but in the same vein, should the EU fund be saving its powder until such a project shows up?
AureliusMA 6 hours ago [-]
European money invested in a European company ought to be a good thing, don’t you think?
Tenoke 5 hours ago [-]
It's possible to be a waste of European money that could be better used elsewhere, though. I think the same about LeCun's company sucking up the little funding here.
gib444 5 hours ago [-]
Do you think it's not?
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.
And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries
When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.
Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.
dist-epoch 7 hours ago [-]
You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing
fallingbananna 7 hours ago [-]
>I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?
Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?
*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.
AureliusMA 5 hours ago [-]
It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.
disgruntledphd2 1 hours ago [-]
> It’s a different culture with different rules
Nah, it's more that there's no Capital Markets Union, so there's just ~30 smaller pots of money scattered across each country.
AureliusMA 6 hours ago [-]
Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.
saelthavron 16 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean by "Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do"? The EU was specifically mentioned and the EU does have a budget, debt, and income:
They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.
disgruntledphd2 1 hours ago [-]
> They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.
I really, really wish that this was true, but basically no-one is pushing for euro bonds (even though they'd be a great idea).
Tenoke 5 hours ago [-]
> Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.
This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.
pembrook 6 hours ago [-]
> LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same
Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.
If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).
The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.
AureliusMA 5 hours ago [-]
This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.
pembrook 5 hours ago [-]
Can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements?
AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less?
The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow.
In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language.
But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.
nik736 7 hours ago [-]
Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the effort that they release those models as open weight but Gemma 4 models are currently way easier to run with more tok/s and less hardware. Their API pricing is just insane for what you get. But I guess enterprise customers don't care about it, this is why they are probably not lowering it.
BoredomIsFun 5 hours ago [-]
> Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B
Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.
tasoeur 8 hours ago [-]
Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
> Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower than their US equivalents, but quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.
As a concrete example, a few years back it leaked that Dan Abramov's (very decent) London salary was half what his US peers earned. Didn't seem to bother the man much at all...
ismailmaj 4 hours ago [-]
Pay isn't the main problem with Paris, it's quality of life.
Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal.
To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar jobs, it's uncommon for people to leave before 6PM and staying late is rewarded as high engagement.
Lastly, you might consider buying and renovating a house so you can escape this dilemma, but it isn't cheap: 2-bedroom (T3) around 700k euros, that represents 20 years of frugal savings on 90k gross.
Vacation, cheap and good healthcare, and unemployment benefits are great in France, but the current government has been eroding these social benefits, and those are not unique to France for well-paid tech workers anyway.
rednb 4 hours ago [-]
Well said, these talking points pushed by EU politicians for decades need to stop. US white collar workers have access to pretty much the same benefits than EU ones, but have a much higher after tax compensation, even taking health care into account.
And nowadays, with the erosion of the social safety net pushed by the French government, the gap is even more narrow. There definitely are huge inequalities there, US are far from being the heartless place EU politicians like to depict.
alexey-salmin 5 hours ago [-]
> quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.
Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.
And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.
nl 3 hours ago [-]
> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
Maybe this appeal to mediocrity in a competitive market explains Mistral's mediocre performance.
I'm Australian. We have 4 weeks paid leave a year, comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage.
Most of my career I avoided taking leave, and I'd usually just get it paid out when I left. Who wants to take leave when you are doing the most interesting, most important thing you can imagine doing?
youoy 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you need to imagine harder.
That aside, if you want to make it rational, you can think of leaves in the context of explore-exploit dilema. Probably a wider exploration would allow you to find better things to exploit. Its like the 20% innovation time that some companies offer
lII1lIlI11ll 4 hours ago [-]
> When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.
etamponi 4 hours ago [-]
Come on. We're talking about a salary that is ONE THIRD of what you'd get at AI labs in US (plus the stock and the bonus). And significantly less taxes. Are you sure that 5 weeks of vacation, what you call "comprehensive" healthcare (spoiler alert: it's not), and unemployment coverage are worth 180K/year reduction in salary (pre-taxes)?
To not talk about the toxic environment that European companies generate in general. Ie: "you should be grateful you have this job".
3748488448 37 seconds ago [-]
I like how no one is pointing out that those 90k will be taxed at 50% (+20% sales tax et al) vs say 15% and no sales tax in florida
that buys you a lot of dentists visits and vacation funds
zerozerotwo 3 hours ago [-]
Usually the us position is unlimited pto and yes you have options if laid off
swiftcoder 2 hours ago [-]
> Usually the us position is unlimited pto
Look, the year is 2026, we all understand by now that unlimited PTO is a neat trick to incentivise your employees to take as little time off as possible.
> and yes you have options if laid off
Not great options. Taking California as a concrete example, you will qualify for a maximum of $450/week in unemployment payments, and if you need healthcare coverage, you will need to spend about $1,500/month on COBRA coverage for a family of 4. This is in a region where the median mortgage payment is $3,500/month.
chrocni380 5 hours ago [-]
> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.
Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.
Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.
At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.
swiftcoder 2 hours ago [-]
> Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that you have a decent software job in the Bay Area, so you earn somewhere in the region of $350k. That little 4 month stint earns you just $116k (since quitting after 4 months means you'll have to return any signing bonus).
Now in the Bay Area your median mortgage is around $3,500/month, so with modest living expenses we're talking a burn of about $5,500/month, meaning you need to spend about $66,000 to cover the year. Plus $17,000 in state and federal taxes, you're now down to a cushion of 33k/year.
That's assuming, of course, that you are happy sending your kids to public school in a dodgy district (private school fees alone would wipe you out, as would the mortgages in a good public school district).
The math doesn't math here chief
tecleandor 4 hours ago [-]
Ah yeah, let me know about your healthcare too, specially after you quit that job. And unemployment. And public services. And scientific entities. And general cost of living. Good you have the military to spend a trillion a year in contractors.
benhurmarcel 5 hours ago [-]
That's pretty high for engineering in France though. Most engineers by far are way below that there, this is top management level.
pkos98 6 hours ago [-]
In Germany AFAIK their Senior base salary ceiling is ~ 180k EUR - approx 210k USD for an Engineering role.
Thats quite competitive for a base salary, as high as max ICT5 Staff base at Apple Munich.
pimeys 6 hours ago [-]
And 180k in Germany, even in Berlin is pretty good. You are living a very good life with that salary.
tecleandor 4 hours ago [-]
That's like top 1% salary for Germany. Maybe 3% if you count family units, or 0.5% for individual taxpayers. I'd say that's pretty good.
pimeys 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and buying a house is still kind of out of reach with this income if you don't start paying your mortgage whey you're 20something...
cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago [-]
Beats 90% of Canadian software engineer salaries. If I wasn't tied down with 2 border collies, a chicken, a cat, and, uh, wife and kids, I'd jump to that in an instant. German quality of life is still pretty good despite all their complaining.
kraftman 7 hours ago [-]
There's more to life than money past a certain point, I'd rather live in the Alps on a lower salary.
user43928 6 hours ago [-]
I imagine you could do so while working for an US AI Lab in Zurich for five times the net pay.
selfawareMammal 6 hours ago [-]
You dont even live in the Alps with 90K lmao. And if you expect top performance, you should expect top salary. Or at least something competitive. 90K for a company like Mistral is a bit embarrassing.
qnpnpmqppnp 6 hours ago [-]
€90k is in the top 5% salaries in France. Of course you can live in the Alps, or anywhere else in France for that matter.
kraftman 6 hours ago [-]
I literally do.
ChrisRR 3 hours ago [-]
Username does not check out
kome 4 hours ago [-]
> You dont even live in the Alps with 90K lmao.
this comment is insane...
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Switzerland is really expensive.
desterothx 3 hours ago [-]
The alps are shared between Switzerland, Italy and France. You can live in the French alps a lot cheaper than in Switzerland
kome 3 hours ago [-]
ok, but besides the fact 90k is absolutely fine for CH as well, and incredibly good for italy, france or austria.
kome 8 hours ago [-]
some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
tasoeur 8 hours ago [-]
I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.
Towaway69 8 hours ago [-]
> researchers may be looking for greener pastures.
Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.
clarionbell 6 hours ago [-]
Sort of yes. But it's nowhere near as much as some would like to believe. It mostly concerns those who have unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money.
Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.
Towaway69 3 hours ago [-]
> unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money.
Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. I thought this would be more to do with politics.
So we’ll end up with ex-US folks starting up those European companies that decouple Europe from US tech! (Thats tongue in cheek.)
eloisant 7 hours ago [-]
US software companies (Google, Meta, MS, etc) have offices in Paris and they pay way more than that. Especially if you take into account total comp (Mistral is private so any stocks you get are "locked" until IPO or sell out)
Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.
jongjong 7 hours ago [-]
When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.
Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.
UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.
That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.
I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.
Bayart 6 hours ago [-]
> When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.
Salaries are calculated differently in France, Germany, US etc. For example working in Germany you're likely to fork a huge amount monthly to your health insurance. It actually makes it difficult to negotiate comp across borders.
$55k USD brut in France is around 2.8k EUR / month after taxes in France, which counts as the upper bracket of Middle Class in most of the country outside of Paris. Paltry when you're used to tech comps but decent for the vast majority of people here.
On the whole I agree that it's not competitive regionally or globally, and as for myself I'd leave for Switzerland or Australia if I had the opportunity.
bad_login 3 hours ago [-]
I will break don't my past salary in france to give people a better idea.
2200€ in my pocket each month with health care and taxes paid.
My yearly gross salary 39_000€.
My yearly super-gross salary (what the company actually pay) 54_000€.
I live in the south east of france not in a big city and I have 13 years of xp.
And to compare to the cost of life :
- 200g of bread is 1€.
- tomato 4€/kg
- beef 27-40€/kg
- 100m2 individual house 350_000€
- 60m2 flat 150_000€
gib444 5 hours ago [-]
> UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations),
Then we got a PM, who's father in law is the founder of Infosys, who changed the law to favour the likes of Infosys (by making it too risky for smaller players to hire contractors). Scandalous corruption
Contracting was going to be my plan for buying a better house and early retirement, but that's gone now. Thanks Rishi
mciancia 7 hours ago [-]
But you should be able to hire most of the people you want, not just some that happen to pick Paris.
Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)
scotty79 5 hours ago [-]
> Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive.
It probably means they don't, they just do their own thing how they see fit.
kensai 3 hours ago [-]
Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.
smurf9852 3 hours ago [-]
Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody.
Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.
2 hours ago [-]
ph4rsikal 8 hours ago [-]
Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days.
It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
The question is not, will mistral be able to create the best models (seems bloody unlikely). The question is, will mistral have enough expertise to dominate its business use-case, which is the model infra/deployment market within the EU (which is more plausible, with even a 3rd, 4th, 5th best model development team).
antupis 7 hours ago [-]
Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.
BenoitP 7 hours ago [-]
And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's.
Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.
eloisant 7 hours ago [-]
Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.
dist-epoch 7 hours ago [-]
if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one
poisonborz 6 hours ago [-]
For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.
They try to build them, but for example in Finland where there's cheap electricity and lot of interest to build them, the people started protesting on rising electricity prices and now the politicians are noticing this.
Same in Denmark.
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
For our data centres we must go to the one place not yet corrupted by capitalism- space!
raumgeist 3 hours ago [-]
They will also be faster in space. Relatively.
The data transmission might be the bottleneck then, but who knows - a rocket full of ssds might go a long way.
v3ss0n 8 hours ago [-]
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
w4yai 8 hours ago [-]
I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.
smurf9852 3 hours ago [-]
You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.
disgruntledphd2 49 minutes ago [-]
> Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.
But they're not competing (offically at least) for GPUs and they have much, much cheaper electricity (which makes pre-training more affordable).
impossiblefork 8 hours ago [-]
If Mistral aren't going to distill other people's large models they obviously need to train their own large models. This obviously requires money for optimization, tuning and training hardware.
mosselman 8 hours ago [-]
They've started hosting GLM-5.2, that should be very telling of their capabilities at the moment. Hopefully the investment will allow them to hire the right people to become competitive.
Raed667 8 hours ago [-]
can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
tristanj 7 hours ago [-]
Chinese models are trained on dubiously collected model traces from Claude/OpenAI that are purchased from model routers. All the major Chinese models use this data. That's one reason they've been able to catch up with Anthropic/OpenAI so quickly, they have so much data.
Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
It's dubiously collected data the whole way down. This is the AI industry.
alansaber 8 hours ago [-]
They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
AureliusMA 5 hours ago [-]
They have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
"Frontier" is a relative, ever-changing target.
adventured 4 hours ago [-]
It's not really: it means those out in front.
OpenAI, Anthropic, China
skeledrew 1 hours ago [-]
Those in front can and will change over time, and regions determine what is measured in the first place. So if they want, the EU can for example define "frontier" as "models made by a European nation that score highest on Math benchmarks".
chronic7304 8 hours ago [-]
> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
Culture.
In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.
Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.
alansaber 8 hours ago [-]
Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
There is logic to it. The ones who work 12h/day for 6d/week does more than the ones who work 8h/day for 5d/week does more than... It's simple scaling that pays off over time even if the general quality of work by the former isn't as high as that of the latter.
ajjahs 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
chronic7304 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
Shame them... for not working their employees into a heart attack at 40?
I'm not sure if your hypothesis is correct. I personally don't think the crazy work hours are what make the US so competitive in tech. But even if it were, it's odd to call for shaming countries for having less insane work cultures.
Foobar8568 7 hours ago [-]
Lol, and Switzerland has high working hours, but I achieve less in 3 months than 3weeks in Paris.
My US colleagues, like German one,just bullshit on reality of what they produce.
Real problem is more on VC, autonomy and small companies.
KronisLV 6 hours ago [-]
> We need to start shaming individual countries in addition to blanket EU.
Reading this gave me a visceral disgust reaction.
I have worked in the middle of the night here to be able to ship prod fixes for meeting deadlines. But that and even overtime should be exceptions rather than the norm.
This better be bait, in which case good job but flagged anyways. Surely nobody would genuinely make the argument that workers should be worked to the bone?
What I personally think could help would be less bureaucracy and regulation in regards to tech advancements (while preserving privacy of individuals), so that the time is used more efficiently, alongside significant investments.
bossyTeacher 8 hours ago [-]
>inferior
Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.
ChrisRR 2 hours ago [-]
Brand new account, only 1 comment.
Checks out
tokai 6 hours ago [-]
In reality US and China are just not efficient enough.
alansaber 8 hours ago [-]
There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
jhuguet 6 hours ago [-]
there was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something
ismailmaj 5 hours ago [-]
All original scientist co-founders of H have left.
From what I've seen in the past few months, Mistral is the unique European lab still trying to compete (I wouldn't count Poolside as EU).
koe123 8 hours ago [-]
Honestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.
Oras 8 hours ago [-]
Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.
I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
koe123 7 hours ago [-]
My feeling is that its a difference in how funding works in different places. The USA will go all in with the populations pensions on a gamble, the Chinese subsidize. This way of operating is typical for the EU.
> Being one year behind is a skill issue
E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing.
> I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
So it's not a skill issue?
Oras 6 hours ago [-]
> > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
> So it's not a skill issue?
I meant by offering sovereign cloud/inference, not for training. But even if it was for training, Chinese labs have limited supply of GPUs, look what they've done. So it is a skill issue.
Also to clarify, I didn't mean European engineers' skills, I meant "you get what you pay for" as a company, that's why I hope they start offering better compensation to retain talent.
koe123 4 hours ago [-]
Understood! Thats reasonable
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
Where is that skill coming from in the first place? What are they doing to attract, nurture and keep it?
blitzar 7 hours ago [-]
> Chinese models are open, available to distill
Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.
koe123 4 hours ago [-]
Its not a grift if it works. If a Chinese corp copies at 90% quality at 50% price within a year it means your American business model was never a good one for competing in international markets. The real grift arguably is pretending that it was.
petcat 3 hours ago [-]
EU is in a precarious situation with Mistral. If you look at their investor sheet, it's primarily American and other foreign investors with some token amount coming from within the EU. It seems like this is positioning as an acquisition play, most likely by a foreign AI tech firm.
We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and capital market being uncompetitive, and then within 2 years just relocated entirely to the US.
My suspicion is that Mistral does not have enough money and enough access to GPU compute to be competitive long-term. And it will most likely end up as an acquisition.
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
" And it will most likely end up as an acquisition." if they were really a thread, OAI / Anthropic would probably have swallowed them up by now, they're just going to go a decade as a EU zombie consultancy.
I hope I'm wrong here.
sznio 9 hours ago [-]
> Existing investors a16z
I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in
0x20cowboy 9 hours ago [-]
Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
luplex 7 hours ago [-]
No, Thiel is talking about the UN and global minimum taxes when he talks about the Antichrist.
hallgrim 9 hours ago [-]
If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
vlyan 8 hours ago [-]
to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing.
Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.
wongarsu 8 hours ago [-]
Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation.
But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
pembrook 7 hours ago [-]
On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable.
It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.
vintagedave 8 hours ago [-]
Other than investment, such as this news?
I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
__alexs 8 hours ago [-]
Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo.
Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.
I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
ghurtado 8 hours ago [-]
Ok, so once again South Park sounds completely deranged when they let reality do the writing.
I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.
Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
Hikikomori 7 hours ago [-]
Their brains were broken because the government still has the ability to say no to them in some cases.
BoredomIsFun 5 hours ago [-]
> seen as the inhibitors of progress
I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress.
What a load of delusion.
bayarearefugee 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're confused here.
a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.
The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
speedgoose 8 hours ago [-]
I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?
bayarearefugee 8 hours ago [-]
Well, sure, but on the other hand Peter Thiel thinks she might be the antichrist, and he has an awful lot of money which means he is an expert on everything.
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
He says she’s the Antichrist because she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization. Being antichrist is an archetype.
georgemcbay 7 hours ago [-]
> she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization.
How exactly does she threaten the continued thriving of our civilization?
It is fine for people to disagree with her worldviews, but labeling her a threat to civilization is an absurd claim.
A civilization that can be threatened by a single person's acts of peaceful protest might be doing something, but it sure isn't thriving.
andsoitis 28 minutes ago [-]
She, as an individual, is not the literal threat. She's a prominent example of the archetype that does.
It's symbolic.
graemep 8 hours ago [-]
Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely.
Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.
ReptileMan 8 hours ago [-]
He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
phtrivier 8 hours ago [-]
The whole "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” also hints at _something_.
But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea.
(Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
> He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
He also expelled demons from a man and conceded to their request to be installed in 2,000 pigs. That led to them drowning, causing substantial destruction of somebody else’s property for no obvious practical necessity. The local people become frightened and ask Jesus to leave their region.
7 hours ago [-]
Frieren 9 hours ago [-]
This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly.
Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
shrubby 9 hours ago [-]
The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger.
Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.
This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
Frieren 8 hours ago [-]
> Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses
Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
shrubby 7 hours ago [-]
Yup. I tried to say that conventional taxation is not enough. As the power is hidden in Panama bank accounts we need to figure out means beyond taxation to neutralize it as it being used to obliterate the future.
maxrev17 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
It's default behavior due to scarcity. Remove that permanently and there's no longer incentive to be greedy.
ekianjo 8 hours ago [-]
> the will of the people.
there is so such thing.
if there is it sure is very flexible and forgetful
przeor 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
keel-control 8 hours ago [-]
I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.
alastairr 8 hours ago [-]
That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
Highly improbable given China is ready to pick up any slack.
alastairr 6 hours ago [-]
That's true now, but given the strategic importance of AI to nation states and the fractious relationship many have with China, I wouldn't expect the eagerness to use Chinese AI to continue indefinitely.
skeledrew 1 hours ago [-]
If you're taking it at the state level, there's no difference between Chinese and US frontier models. They go with the most accessible, which is the former. Just as trade still happens overwhelmingly between China and US despite the politics.
ludvigk 8 hours ago [-]
Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?)
In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
0xDEAFBEAD 8 hours ago [-]
OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
clarionbell 5 hours ago [-]
If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well.
Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking.
Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue.
What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow.
And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.
cbg0 8 hours ago [-]
Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.
slopinthebag 7 hours ago [-]
You'd still have access to the Chinese models though right? Even if you want to argue they aren't truly SOTA they're still pretty dang good.
loehnsberg 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.
aurareturn 8 hours ago [-]
Is there money in niche models?
catdog 8 hours ago [-]
Is there money in frontier?
vineyardmike 8 hours ago [-]
Yes...?
Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.
debugnik 5 hours ago [-]
Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.
aurareturn 5 hours ago [-]
The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.
Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.
disgruntledphd2 42 minutes ago [-]
> The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.
We'll see I suppose. Until the audited financial statements are released, no-one who doesn't work for an AI lab can be sure.
slopinthebag 7 hours ago [-]
Lol that chart is hilarious when you look at Nvidia.
Always sell shovels in a gold rush I guess
phtrivier 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, there is revenue, and market valuation. Is there _profits_ in frontier models ?
What is the horizon for openai and anthropic to _make_ money ? Will they achieve that by charging more for frontier models, or investing slightly less in training frontier models, etc... ?
pbmonster 7 hours ago [-]
> Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
No...? Of course not?
Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?
aurareturn 7 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is growing 10x revenue every year.
They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year.
When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
surgical_fire 7 hours ago [-]
> They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate.
And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029!
> When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.
aurareturn 5 hours ago [-]
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.
surgical_fire 5 hours ago [-]
Or they bleed money like crazy, and their margins are pretty awful. Which is the correct answer.
Your $200 subscription is a major net loss for them. The vast majority that pays for that would cancel in a heartbeat the moment they had to pay API prices. Which may or may not be profitable, I am not entirely sure. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is.
aurareturn 41 minutes ago [-]
Are we still calculated $200 subscription token spend based on their highly inflated API token cost and then concluding that they must be losing money on all $200 subscriptions?
koe123 8 hours ago [-]
They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe because they respect copyright laws?
novoreorx 1 hours ago [-]
Mistral is quite fast for my proofreading tasks. I've benchmarked various LLM providers on my Singapore and Hong Kong VPS instances, and `mistral-small-latest` was the fastest. The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed
sbinnee 2 hours ago [-]
I am still waiting for their large model. Seemingly they only recently started combining reasoning, agentic, and multimodal in one model. They have mistral-3.5 medium and mistral-4 small. There is no 3.5 small nor large not to mention no 4 medium nor 4 large. These model numbers to me seem like that their model release did not meet the schedule. I am still waiting for 4 large and expect it to match at least glm 5.2 performance.
baq 7 hours ago [-]
10-20x more still needed, and then somewhere to build a couple DCs. Fingers crossed they make it, neither US nor Chinese labs can be trusted, even with open weights.
steinvakt2 8 hours ago [-]
That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
Daunk 8 hours ago [-]
*losing trillions
bpodgursky 8 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.
Systemerror7A69 8 hours ago [-]
And my wallet is thought to contain a billion dollars, so long as I don't open it.
Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?
benjaminwootton 8 hours ago [-]
It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.
disgruntledphd2 41 minutes ago [-]
You probably shouldn't believe leaks when a company has a financial incentive to appear profitable (particularly when attempting to IPO).
nesk_ 8 hours ago [-]
If they were cash flow positive they would tell it to everyone, be sure of that.
tristanj 7 hours ago [-]
Anthropic is currently in an IPO quiet period and cannot publish such information.
r4rf 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tristanj 2 hours ago [-]
I find it amusing when people create brand new accounts just to shitpost fake info. Bc if they posted with their real account, they'd lose karma.
Since filing for IPO confidentiality, Anthropic hasn't made any public statements about its profitability via a non-GAAP metric.
The leaked figures you're referring to aren't even published by Anthropic.
eloisant 7 hours ago [-]
it's fake cash flow based on circular economy
adventured 4 hours ago [-]
Billions of long-term users for the most important technology in human history isn't a premise of fake cash in a circular economy.
You might as well pretend there's no money in search or social media.
1999. That Google, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money. Hello GoTo.
2006. That Facebook, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money.
One more: 2020. That Uber, I could clone an MVP and kill them over the weekend if I really wanted to. That's a side project at best. They're bleeding to death anyway, losing money hand over fist, they'll never make it. They have no moat at all.
phtrivier 3 hours ago [-]
Was google already selling ads in 1999 ? Because before that, NO, they did not have a viable long term economic model.
r4rf 2 hours ago [-]
Funny thing is, they stated their reason for existence was because ad-based revenue models would corrupt search quality. Funny that!
mirekrusin 1 hours ago [-]
Same as our OpenAI friends, who founded a non-profit because one company (Google) holding AGI would be dangerous for humanity. Turns out it's only dangerous when it's somebody else's company. When it's yours, it changes things slightly.
mirekrusin 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hobofan 8 hours ago [-]
Are they, though? I would say, let's find out when the IPO settles, but then again the market also sustains a incredibly crazy valuation for Tesla.
steinvakt2 8 hours ago [-]
If not, I’m buying stocks
nicce 8 hours ago [-]
Better to buy GPUs and RAM with current rate
danmaz74 8 hours ago [-]
At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
shikck200 8 hours ago [-]
Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month.
The bubble is going to burst soon.
skeledrew 6 hours ago [-]
I think the Pro and other subs allow them to save big on ads (Claude Code use is required and it pushes their ads) and allow easy access to free data (CC occasionally solicits feedback and session sharing, which I'm pretty sure some users oblige). Also CC does massive prompt caching tailored to work in lockstep with their platform. With all that and who knows what else, I'd say it balances over time.
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
My dudes, the EU doesn't have enough gas to survive the following winter, let alone if Poutine decides to go around Ukraine and test NATO in production.
Mistral is the cherry on the sundae of our concerns. It's a spiritual thing.
whazor 7 hours ago [-]
It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models.
An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models.
With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.
rhdunn 6 hours ago [-]
It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently.
It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training).
Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.
raumgeist 3 hours ago [-]
On a higher level it might make sense to build the expertise that comes with base training.
I dont know enough about the process to estimate these gains, but china has been doing it in manufacturing for decades.
All the money in the world is useless when no one knows how to do the thing
asimpleusecase 3 hours ago [-]
So what happens when Mistral creates a collection of powerful AIs for different clients that have fundamentally different ethical frameworks from each other? Then those AI interact? Do they politely agree to disagree? Or do they goal seek against each other?
capocasa 3 hours ago [-]
Last time I tried Mistral large it was pretty bad at programming but I hear they're fairly good at European language legal.
AidenVennis 8 hours ago [-]
I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be enough to be used by a lot of companies and governments in the EU that are (trying to) move away from US tech.
Traubenfuchs 8 hours ago [-]
> but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet
They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.
Tepix 7 hours ago [-]
I really hope that Mistral will catch up.
I'm left wondering why so many Chinese labs manage to be competitive.
Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?
brokegrammer 4 hours ago [-]
I love Mistral and I use it whenever I don't care about quality. For example, it's my go to model for generating git commit messages by leveraging their free codestral model.
I wouldn't pay for it though.
JanTurnherr 6 hours ago [-]
I'm using Mistral for a local VN Proofreader and its by far the best Local 14B Model for this specific use case.
alex_duf 5 hours ago [-]
What's VN in this context?
JanTurnherr 5 hours ago [-]
A Visual Novel. Its from a Software-Engineering standpoint interesting, since the requirements for this specific Use-Case are immense.
piyush_patel_ha 6 hours ago [-]
I have used some of models of mistral, I'm liking where they're heading.
glimshe 6 hours ago [-]
I know a lot of people who use AI, but literally nobody who uses Mistral.
0x20cowboy 9 hours ago [-]
Très bien! C’est parti!
zoobab 7 hours ago [-]
Still no training data in sight.
Maybe we need to abolish copyright?
darkteflon 7 hours ago [-]
Surely outfits like Sakana will be looking at a similar strategy. The White House / Anthropic spat supercharged all this.
jeanmichelselli 4 hours ago [-]
I just hope they don't become the new OpenAI...
phtrivier 3 hours ago [-]
The vibe in the conversation seems new to me. As if we're crossing a section in the "First they ignore you, then laugh at you, then hate you, etc..."
Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?
cl-coder 8 hours ago [-]
So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?
nalekberov 8 hours ago [-]
"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.
philipwhiuk 1 hours ago [-]
The US invested billions to ensure sovereign launch capability. Seems to have paid off.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
They are all responsible for driving up RAM prices.
I want my money back.
lain98 8 hours ago [-]
I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects.
Not even a phone call :(
elvennn 8 hours ago [-]
I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them.
Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.
selestify 7 hours ago [-]
Care to share any more?
tasoeur 8 hours ago [-]
I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).
colesantiago 8 hours ago [-]
Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral?
Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw)
Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
rytsEa 4 hours ago [-]
I am sure plenty of people had the same thought.
colesantiago 3 hours ago [-]
Not many can execute, but people are welcome to try if you can get customers.
Better than throwing CVs everywhere with no response for years.
Morkeeth 8 hours ago [-]
Europes last chance
throwa356262 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know.
The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
alansaber 8 hours ago [-]
Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?
aurareturn 8 hours ago [-]
I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS.
That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
Zambyte 5 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of people simply don't need SOTA models. I run most of my programming on a single 7900 XTX with Qwen 3.8 27b. I'm more interested in scaling out to run more instances of the model in parallel, than I am in scaling up to better models.
throwa356262 7 hours ago [-]
My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.
aurareturn 7 hours ago [-]
Impressive doesn't mean sustainable.
We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral.
I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.
throwa356262 4 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, small efficient models using recent improvements should be more sustainable than huge frontier models that require billions and years to train
aurareturn 2 hours ago [-]
Small efficient models are commodities.
r4rf 2 hours ago [-]
"Impressive doesn't mean sustainable."
The frontier labs at the current rate are also not sustainable.
You make some incredibly stupid assumptions - like assuming revenue growth rate of Anthropic and OAI will continue on.
Elon-Musk type stuff. lmfao.
aurareturn 2 hours ago [-]
Why is it not sustainable when Anthropic has already had a profitable quarter?
philipwhiuk 1 hours ago [-]
It's pretty easy to use accounting wizardry to have one profitable quarter.
aurareturn 43 minutes ago [-]
So what makes their AI business fundamentally unsustainable?
codingbot3000 5 hours ago [-]
"Probably safer to stay out of the race for now."
What kind of attitude is that?
eloisant 7 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, Europe needs a wider AI ecosystem and not rely on just one company
The two companies have read the market the same.
It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
If you know Apple's history, this should stand out to you.
I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.
It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.
They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened.
Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable if they hadn’t had a whole continent of wealthy customers, and no competition.
I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.
Never had to do it before. That's how much it has changed.
1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap
2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability. Most deployments don't need AGI In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it. Example: Case of a hospital flooded in emails. You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest. If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance
Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"
Does Mistral have material market share for any application, including anything that would fall under item 2 above?
You don't need to view China as some scary boogeyman who's going to use AI to attack you or w/e the current conspiracy is. They just need to continue peacefully outperforming while everyone else gets fat and lazy.
Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do.
But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely.
I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security.
But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having.
This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.
Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.
I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default and that's why the sovereign part is important.
Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competitive but has this alignment is the solution, rather than accepting an inferior one.
From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?
I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals.
I’ll get my coat.
Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*
*…and the Chinese equivalents.
Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.
Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).
Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.
Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.
Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.
It's the same with gaming
When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"
Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
Which is smart move
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?
In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.
Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.
Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.
First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).
I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.
I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.
The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.
AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:
> During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.
> Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.
They have released models speficially for programming that ”vibe coding” would be safer.
https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral/
It's definitely a lot slower, though
There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.
And yeah still for some reason they often can't understand how to set up any project locally without handholding, which is something you'd think an LLM would actually be good at
Even those old llama models were ok for coding
Yes yes they won't be like Claude's fire and forget (until you see how many tokens you burned to write "Hello World")
You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).
If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.
My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).
When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
> they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
So I guess Anthropic called for banning Chinese models when they said "but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."? - [0]
May be they imply it? They work behind the scene for it? well, who knows. My guess is as good as yours. But since we're acting like a child, bending the truth is allowed?
By the way, China is decisive. They just banned outright Claude and Open AI. I guess no open arguments about regulation is good?
[0] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
> I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.
I'm all for following positive examples, as long as we keep democracy. We don't need to copy everything, just the good parts.
To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
With it's general approach of Open Weights, and being able to be deployed on-premise (/private/public cloud), they are a viable solution for your typical European enterprise, that has to comply with traditional (non-AI) regulation. With the NIS2 directive the amount of those companies is also significantly expanding.
We[1] are in the same market as Mistral, and among our customers, the go-to-solution of MS Copilot is typically performing badly, and the typical SaaS solutions are not even given a consideration, which is why they are reaching for on-premise-first solutions.
[0]: https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/
[1]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato
Not Mistral
Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.
To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...
There are multiple aircraft manufacturers for smaller aircraft, and there are several showing up for electric aircraft today.
For jets, the capex required to build them is massive, and its never going to have an upstart just up and build a jet.
The regulations in place are the reason why its safe to fly, and airlines have the safety records they do.
This is the degree of safety end consumers want to be reassured that its safe to fly. The checks and balances in places create the market that you are hoping to give over to cheaper upstarts.
The market doesn't exist without that safety regulation.
See how people feel uneasy when flying Boeing after the decay of their engineering and quality culture became public knowledge.
I'd be curious to hear about specific examples of AI regulation that affect small businesses without a good reason.
> that amount can't be zero because
Sounds like you're agreeing with my point.
This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.
It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.
Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.
The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.
Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.
This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.
If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.
Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
> Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
Financial markets are highly regulated. They are one of the most structured markets out there.
The outcomes in all those markets, whether they are good or bad, is a direct result of how the markets are structured.
The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was a direct result of regulators being defanged and underfunded for multiple years.
If you look at technology: innovation amazing in the era of unlimited horizons, the era of "move fast and break things."
However, the cost of externalities from inventions like social media, were not captured in that market structure. This means that firms can absolutely pollute or addict people in the information economy, capturing the profit but socializing the costs.
The ability of dominant players to consume/acquihire upstarts and keep their market position, is a drag on innovation and consumer outcomes today.
The situation that was faced in the early days of a new technology is different than what is faced in its maturity, when the advantages of the nimble upstart give way to the massive overlord.
At each stage, you have to craft the incentives and rules to ensure you achieve the outcomes you (as a nation) actually priortize.
I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.
If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases
Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods
Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts
Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising
Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial)
The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.
We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.
Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
number of crimes in 2016: 6,372,526
number of crimes in 2025 (last data): 5,508,559
https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...
https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem. I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.
Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.
But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".
It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not just a race to the bottom. The idea of a free for all market is an utopia that doesn't exist ... thankfully.
In a market that has been designed to let people take part in voluntary transactions, we also design methods for making sure that the counterpart takes responsibility, and delivers the agreed amount quality of product.
If you purchase a car that won't turn on, you're in your good right to make a claim against the producer. Same for all the other things you mention. And people do.
You're making a point about negative externalities. Agreed that a factory shouldn't just be able to poison a river, because there's no tangible cost to piping your dirty water to one. Here it makes sense to make artificial interventions, in my opinion.
A way more interesting conversation would be where to regulate, how much, for how long, what impacts would it have in innovation, etc not that I want to be free to get sold broken goods.
> as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety
How would you know they disregard food safety if there's no regulation on what food safety means?
The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.
You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.
The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.
The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.
Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.
I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.
I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
And it's not as if there aren't a bunch of somewhat arbitrary regulation in the US either. But the general sense I got from the US, was that people still feel agency to improve their reality, and that there's fewer artificial barriers to that end. (Except for building houses in California. omg. That sounds like a horrible horrible process. At least for those I spoke to).
I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.
Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.
You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)
Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.
I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it. I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.
> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,
> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.
> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy
I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng
They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy.
Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.
We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out.
It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place.
Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.
If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-...
The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
Then it's a good thing that Chinese bellies are satisfied, we can get to those existential problems, now.
Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even.
Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.
As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
What moat does Google have that's so special in search?
You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.
When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.
Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.
Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.
At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.
I haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.
Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:
- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).
- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.
- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.
One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.
The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.
With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.
EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
Isn't it to be the globally dominant provider of such a service? Everything else is in service of that goal.
which is a market Chinese labs won't get into.
they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.
Their own models seems like years old OpenAI models, hallucinations all over the place and coding was crazy slow.
I can only say two good things about them:
- their hosted glm model was fast - because I canceled within 14 days they gave me a full refund.
I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.
The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.
Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.
You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.
Because this forum is sponsored by Claude and Anslopic.
Anything against the narrative is attacked.
Used mistral 7b locally for years - it’s fine.
Their web version is like a slightly worse Gemini - also fine
Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.
What’s contrarian? Dont they also sell API and subscription like every other lab?
Yeah, spot on.
I'd add they are also betting on building specialized AI's targeting narrow yet very profitable segment markets, where general AI's à la AnthroOpenAI don't work very well.
You crazy to think that Fable and Astra capabilities is fake
Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Where in the fuck did we stall out?
Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant.
It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already hosting GLM) and (2) selling AI-related consultant service (they're also doing that already).
I’m not sure really what the winning strategy is in this weird arms race.
So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China.
Which would be the most European outcome ever.
Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.
I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.
I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.
Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.
Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers.
This is supposed to be a success story?
But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough.
Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started.
Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?
It's not like everyone using AI has the same software development cycle. It's not even that everyone using AI is developing software.
If the model cannot perform the task with adequate quality while being many times faster and cheaper than a human, it is not good enough in my view.
If a SOTA model would be good enough, surely that would be preferable to a human using cheap AI assistance for a moderate efficiency improvement.
For coding, I don't see it.
Physical tasks? I don't know, it's not my area of expertise. I do not think AI is widely deployed for physical tasks yet, not even the SOTA is good enough.
This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.
> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing
So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.
They are simultaneously first: the two leapfrog each other with regularity, and are meaningfully ahead of the competition.
I think that there's a real second mover advantage in letting others waste money on researching ultra oversized models while creating smaller and cheaper models from their learnings.
There is no close second, because the AA Index points are expentially harder to get as you get closer to the first.
Which is interesting since who are the investors and what exactly are their roles? Samsung - European? BlackRock - European? Salesforce Ventures - European? Etc.
So yes it might well be
> [...] the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch.
but the money isn't European.
They have been focusing largely on government and business not consumer, which is fine. Perhaps coding is not something they want to achieve, but they do provide Codestral. It's a signal it's a market of interest to them.
That is absolutely not "do nothing".
You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.
LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).
More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.
So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en
There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.
And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.
When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.
Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.
On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?
Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?
*I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.
Nah, it's more that there's no Capital Markets Union, so there's just ~30 smaller pots of money scattered across each country.
https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/bud...
I really, really wish that this was true, but basically no-one is pushing for euro bonds (even though they'd be a great idea).
The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.
that is being replaced with Pax Silica
https://www.state.gov/pax-silica
Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.
If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).
The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.
AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less?
The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow.
In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language.
There were people like Kalgeri who had a vision for a 'united states of europe,' which arguably would have been better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi
But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.
Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.
Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?
Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower than their US equivalents, but quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.
As a concrete example, a few years back it leaked that Dan Abramov's (very decent) London salary was half what his US peers earned. Didn't seem to bother the man much at all...
Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal.
To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar jobs, it's uncommon for people to leave before 6PM and staying late is rewarded as high engagement.
Lastly, you might consider buying and renovating a house so you can escape this dilemma, but it isn't cheap: 2-bedroom (T3) around 700k euros, that represents 20 years of frugal savings on 90k gross.
Vacation, cheap and good healthcare, and unemployment benefits are great in France, but the current government has been eroding these social benefits, and those are not unique to France for well-paid tech workers anyway.
And nowadays, with the erosion of the social safety net pushed by the French government, the gap is even more narrow. There definitely are huge inequalities there, US are far from being the heartless place EU politicians like to depict.
Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.
And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.
Maybe this appeal to mediocrity in a competitive market explains Mistral's mediocre performance.
I'm Australian. We have 4 weeks paid leave a year, comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage.
Most of my career I avoided taking leave, and I'd usually just get it paid out when I left. Who wants to take leave when you are doing the most interesting, most important thing you can imagine doing?
That aside, if you want to make it rational, you can think of leaves in the context of explore-exploit dilema. Probably a wider exploration would allow you to find better things to exploit. Its like the 20% innovation time that some companies offer
What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.
To not talk about the toxic environment that European companies generate in general. Ie: "you should be grateful you have this job".
that buys you a lot of dentists visits and vacation funds
Look, the year is 2026, we all understand by now that unlimited PTO is a neat trick to incentivise your employees to take as little time off as possible.
> and yes you have options if laid off
Not great options. Taking California as a concrete example, you will qualify for a maximum of $450/week in unemployment payments, and if you need healthcare coverage, you will need to spend about $1,500/month on COBRA coverage for a family of 4. This is in a region where the median mortgage payment is $3,500/month.
Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.
Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.
Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.
At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that you have a decent software job in the Bay Area, so you earn somewhere in the region of $350k. That little 4 month stint earns you just $116k (since quitting after 4 months means you'll have to return any signing bonus).
Now in the Bay Area your median mortgage is around $3,500/month, so with modest living expenses we're talking a burn of about $5,500/month, meaning you need to spend about $66,000 to cover the year. Plus $17,000 in state and federal taxes, you're now down to a cushion of 33k/year.
That's assuming, of course, that you are happy sending your kids to public school in a dodgy district (private school fees alone would wipe you out, as would the mortgages in a good public school district).
The math doesn't math here chief
Thats quite competitive for a base salary, as high as max ICT5 Staff base at Apple Munich.
this comment is insane...
Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.
Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.
Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. I thought this would be more to do with politics.
So we’ll end up with ex-US folks starting up those European companies that decouple Europe from US tech! (Thats tongue in cheek.)
Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.
Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.
UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.
That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.
I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.
Salaries are calculated differently in France, Germany, US etc. For example working in Germany you're likely to fork a huge amount monthly to your health insurance. It actually makes it difficult to negotiate comp across borders.
$55k USD brut in France is around 2.8k EUR / month after taxes in France, which counts as the upper bracket of Middle Class in most of the country outside of Paris. Paltry when you're used to tech comps but decent for the vast majority of people here.
On the whole I agree that it's not competitive regionally or globally, and as for myself I'd leave for Switzerland or Australia if I had the opportunity.
2200€ in my pocket each month with health care and taxes paid.
My yearly gross salary 39_000€. My yearly super-gross salary (what the company actually pay) 54_000€.
Actually the company paid less due to CIR (https://entreprendre.service-public.gouv.fr/vosdroits/F23533) I don't the number but at absolute minimum the company could have paid 31_320€.
I live in the south east of france not in a big city and I have 13 years of xp.
And to compare to the cost of life :
Then we got a PM, who's father in law is the founder of Infosys, who changed the law to favour the likes of Infosys (by making it too risky for smaller players to hire contractors). Scandalous corruption
Contracting was going to be my plan for buying a better house and early retirement, but that's gone now. Thanks Rishi
Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)
It probably means they don't, they just do their own thing how they see fit.
Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.
Same in Denmark.
But they're not competing (offically at least) for GPUs and they have much, much cheaper electricity (which makes pre-training more affordable).
Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.
OpenAI, Anthropic, China
Culture.
In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.
Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.
I'm not sure if your hypothesis is correct. I personally don't think the crazy work hours are what make the US so competitive in tech. But even if it were, it's odd to call for shaming countries for having less insane work cultures.
My US colleagues, like German one,just bullshit on reality of what they produce.
Real problem is more on VC, autonomy and small companies.
Reading this gave me a visceral disgust reaction.
I have worked in the middle of the night here to be able to ship prod fixes for meeting deadlines. But that and even overtime should be exceptions rather than the norm.
This better be bait, in which case good job but flagged anyways. Surely nobody would genuinely make the argument that workers should be worked to the bone?
What I personally think could help would be less bureaucracy and regulation in regards to tech advancements (while preserving privacy of individuals), so that the time is used more efficiently, alongside significant investments.
Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.
Checks out
From what I've seen in the past few months, Mistral is the unique European lab still trying to compete (I wouldn't count Poolside as EU).
I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
> Being one year behind is a skill issue
E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing.
> I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
So it's not a skill issue?
> So it's not a skill issue?
I meant by offering sovereign cloud/inference, not for training. But even if it was for training, Chinese labs have limited supply of GPUs, look what they've done. So it is a skill issue.
Also to clarify, I didn't mean European engineers' skills, I meant "you get what you pay for" as a company, that's why I hope they start offering better compensation to retain talent.
Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.
We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and capital market being uncompetitive, and then within 2 years just relocated entirely to the US.
My suspicion is that Mistral does not have enough money and enough access to GPU compute to be competitive long-term. And it will most likely end up as an acquisition.
I hope I'm wrong here.
I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in
Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.
But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.
I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.
I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.
Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress.
What a load of delusion.
a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.
The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
How exactly does she threaten the continued thriving of our civilization?
It is fine for people to disagree with her worldviews, but labeling her a threat to civilization is an absurd claim.
A civilization that can be threatened by a single person's acts of peaceful protest might be doing something, but it sure isn't thriving.
It's symbolic.
Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.
But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea.
(Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")
He also expelled demons from a man and conceded to their request to be installed in 2,000 pigs. That led to them drowning, causing substantial destruction of somebody else’s property for no obvious practical necessity. The local people become frightened and ask Jesus to leave their region.
Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.
This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
there is so such thing.
if there is it sure is very flexible and forgetful
In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking.
Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue.
What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow.
And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.
Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
https://isaiprofitable.com/
The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.
Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.
We'll see I suppose. Until the audited financial statements are released, no-one who doesn't work for an AI lab can be sure.
Always sell shovels in a gold rush I guess
What is the horizon for openai and anthropic to _make_ money ? Will they achieve that by charging more for frontier models, or investing slightly less in training frontier models, etc... ?
No...? Of course not?
Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?
They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year.
When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029!
> When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.
Your $200 subscription is a major net loss for them. The vast majority that pays for that would cancel in a heartbeat the moment they had to pay API prices. Which may or may not be profitable, I am not entirely sure. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is.
Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?
Since filing for IPO confidentiality, Anthropic hasn't made any public statements about its profitability via a non-GAAP metric.
The leaked figures you're referring to aren't even published by Anthropic.
You might as well pretend there's no money in search or social media.
1999. That Google, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money. Hello GoTo.
2006. That Facebook, it has no serious business model, it'll never make real money.
One more: 2020. That Uber, I could clone an MVP and kill them over the weekend if I really wanted to. That's a side project at best. They're bleeding to death anyway, losing money hand over fist, they'll never make it. They have no moat at all.
The bubble is going to burst soon.
Mistral is the cherry on the sundae of our concerns. It's a spiritual thing.
An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models.
With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.
It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training).
Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.
They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.
Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?
I wouldn't pay for it though.
Maybe we need to abolish copyright?
Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?
I want my money back.
Not even a phone call :(
Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.
Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw)
Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
Better than throwing CVs everywhere with no response for years.
The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral.
I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.
The frontier labs at the current rate are also not sustainable.
You make some incredibly stupid assumptions - like assuming revenue growth rate of Anthropic and OAI will continue on.
Elon-Musk type stuff. lmfao.
What kind of attitude is that?