Europe's bright star has been quiet for a while, great to see them back and good to see them come back to Open Source light with Apache 2.0 licenses - they're too far from the SOTA pack that exclusive/proprietary models would work in their favor.

Mistral had the best small models on consumer GPUs for a while, hopefully Ministral 14B lives up to their benchmarks.

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rvz 8 hours ago | parent [-]

All thanks to the US VCs that acutally have money to fund Mistral's entire business.

Had they gone to the EU, Mistral would have gotten a miniscule grant from the EU to train their AI models.

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amarcheschi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Mistral biggest investor is asml, although it became so later than other vcs

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crimsoneer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, one is a government, the other are VCs (also, I would be shocked if there isn't some French gov funding somewhere in the massive mistral pile).

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whiplash451 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1. so what 2. asml

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rvz 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

1. It matters.

2. Did ASML invest in Mistral in their first round of venture funding or was it US VCs all along that took that early risk and backed them from the very start?

Risk aversion is in the DNA and in almost every plot of land in Europe such that US VCs saw something in Mistral before even the european giants like ASML did.

ASML would have passed on Mistral from the start and Mistral would have instead begged to the EU for a grant.

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apexalpha 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1. Big problem

2. ASML was propped up by ASM and Philips, stepping in as "VCs"

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didibus 7 hours ago | parent [-]

For VC don't you need a lot of capital and people with too much money?

Isn't that then a chicken and egg?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> and people with too much money? No. VC’s historical capital has come from institutional investors. Pensions. Endowments. Foundations.
	▲	5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]