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

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy.

There is no AI company like Mistral.

Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away.

This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore.

It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive.

I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.

1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"?

2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.

3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.

4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.

While I tend to agree, the other players (Anthropic, OAI, Google) don't have super unique USPs compared to one another, either. Just to be fair.

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

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means we're not going to see it at the scale of revenue and valuations or fundraising as the US and thats ok. It's important not to try play the same game e.g burning all the funding on GPUs and high compensation. Spotify, Adyen, etc have proven their worth starting in the EU. Even in the UK there are specific companies that cater to banking, ride hailing, etc and we need to keep some of that tech local. I think this also goes down to the infrastructure level of technology, cloud and AI which we haven't done enough of. And maybe even mobile and AR glasses.

France has some of the best computer scientists in the world. Cheap energy. Rule of law and is overall an extremely desirable place to live.

Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny!

OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.

A frontier lab being “behind” doesn’t really matter because a lot of the work done by those labs - the rnd - is only proven useful once released and the releases end up letting other frontier labs catch up.

The play is either “dear god let me be first to market and have 8bn users” or something else.

OpenAI is now playing both camps as they’re pushing hard on b2g now. But it’s a terrible idea for govs in europe to create a dependency to OpenAI. There’s a likely world where 90%+ of eu govs sign with Mistral and that is a perfectly fine outcome for the investors imo.

Being based in Europa is a massive USP for European companies - the USA being harder and harder to trust each day. It's difficult to build business on shaky ground.

What is the USP of the countless others? They even converged on API.

Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.

Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?

That USP seems pretty important in todays world.

What if Trump suddenly block export of new models unless we kiss the ring?

Russia and China have long had a similar strategy of keeping domestic competition alive, even if it initially is behind the foreign competitors. See VK.com and stuff.

As a European: all for it!

The pixtral models are quite good and fast. They might be on par with gemma 3

ASML is not an american tech company known to throw billions around. It appears they do see the value of LLM-based AI but are not comfortable working with either US or China based suppliers. Also, don't disregard that their new CEO is French...

I generally share your skepticism, but didn‘t DeepSeek prove that one does not need a „competitive advantage“ in hardware? And if that does not hold for HW, it likely also doesn't hold for energy.

I understand your thoughts regarding pace but I don't think that places like ChatGPT will improve at the same rate especially if their rather disappointing recent release is anything to go by.

Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options.

Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.

That's a massive USP.

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful? Especially with how

Even if it were only that, that is an incredibly strong USP for the world's second largest economy. As recent US actions have shown, digital sovereignty is more important than ever.

It's better to be the undisputed leader in the second largest economy than to duke it out for the largest one.

Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation.

To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral:

- some of the best edge models.

- some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models.

- unique small language models.

- unique OCR offering.

And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.

They focus also on supporting well languages from Europe, and they are not anti open source.

What recent history showed us is that neither of LLM providers is unique, people switch models easily, nobody cares about the name but about the optimal performance for a given task (which can vary a lot between use cases).

(For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)

I mean, even if that's true, being based in the EU might matter a lot given how keen that bloc is on becoming more technologically sovereign from America and China right now

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

Mistral being in the EU is a feature. A lot of European companies/organizations are hesitant to use US/Chinese LLMs because of privacy reasons. For instance, the university my wife is working at are evaluating using Mistral as their default (and only reimbursed) LLM.

One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.