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.
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?
So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?
> Existing investors a16z
I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in
Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
I think you're confused here.
a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.
The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
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?
He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_fo...
Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
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.
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.
Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!
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No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year 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.
There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
> 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.
Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there money in niche models?
That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
*losing trillions
Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.
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.
If not, I’m buying stocks
Better to buy GPUs and RAM with current rate
At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
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.
Très bien! C’est parti!
Europes last chance
I don't know.
The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
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?
I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects.
Not even a phone call :(
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.
Too bad Mistral fucking sucks
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.