Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)

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touwer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes

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pu_pe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train.

Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.

	▲	mring33621 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Often you have to choose the 'least bad' choice. Mistral may be that, from an EU POV.

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t-vi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They have some pretty cool people, though, no reason not to think they'll catch up soon enough.

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renticulous 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this scenario far fetched? Just as Nations pay large companies to build a factory in their country, Nations will similarly pay AI companies to build a national AI model for their own consumption because AI is that beneficial.

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baq 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a risk, but since they have training expertise they should be able to distill the best open source models to reach at least approximate parity comfortably. Frontier model territory looks increasingly out of reach for anyone without $100B for training and then you have to serve inference to recoup cost, that's an expensive proposition in EU.

...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.