I think people from the US often aren't aware how many companies from the EU simply won't risk losing their data to the providers you have in mind, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. They simply are no option at all.

The company I work for for example, a mid-sized tech business, currently investigates their local hosting options for LLMs. So Mistral certainly will be an option, among the Qwen familiy and Deepseek.

Mistral is positioning themselves for that market, not the one you have in mind. Comparing their models with Claude etc. would mean associating themselves with the data leeches, which they probably try to avoid.

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adam_patarino 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We're seeing the same thing for many companies, even in the US. Exposing your entire codebase to an unreliable third party is not exactly SOC / ISO compliant. This is one of the core things that motivated us to develop cortex.build so we could put the model on the developer's machine and completely isolate the code without complicated model deployments and maintenance.

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BoorishBears 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mistral is founded by multiple Meta engineers, no?

Funded mostly by US VCs?

Hosted primarily on Azure?

Do you really have to go out of your way to start calling their competition "data leeches" for out-executing them?

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troyvit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's wayyyy to early in the game to say who is out-executing whom.

I mean why do you think those guys left Meta? It reminds me of a time ten years ago I was sitting on a flight with a guy who works for the natural gas industry. I was (cough still am) a pretty naive environmentalist, so I asked him what he thought of solar, wind, etc. and why should we be investing in natural gas when there are all these other options. His response was simple. Natural gas can serve as a bridge from hydrocarbons to true green energy sources. Leverage that dense energy to springboard the other sources in the mix and you build a path forward to carbon free energy.

I see Mistral's use of US VCs the same way. Those VCs are hedging their bets and maybe hoping to make a few bucks. A few of them are probably involved because they're buddies with the former Meta guys "back in the day." If Mistral executes on their plan of being a transparent b2b option with solid data protections then they used those VCs the way they deserve to be used and the VCs make a few bucks. If Europe ever catches up to the US in terms of data centers, would Mistral move off of Azure? I'd bet $5 that they would.

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sofixa 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mistral are mostly focusing on b2b, and for customers that want to self-host (banks and stuff). So their founders being from Meta, or where their cloud platform are hosted, are entirely irrelevant to the story.

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BoorishBears 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The fact they would not exist without the leeches and built their business on the leeches is irrelevant.

Pan-nationalism is a hell of a drug: a company that does not know you exist puts out an objectively awful release, and people take frank discussion of it as a personal slight.

	▲	baq an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you want to allocate capital efficiently planet-scale you have to ignore nations to the largest extent possible.
	▲	sofixa 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The fact they would not exist without the leeches and built their business on the leeches is irrelevant. How so?