| ▲ | donmb 3 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | BoredomIsFun a minute ago | parent | next [-] |
| Mistral is odd. They have made mostly flops, boring models (Ministral 3, Mistral Small 4, Small 3, Small 3.1) together with a classic masterpiece Mistral Nemo and very good Mistral Large 2407, Mistral Small 22b, Mistral Small 3.2. |
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| ▲ | eloisant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The problem is that they're in a weird position between US models and Chinese models. Not as performant as US models, not as cheap as Chinese models. Especially as Chinese models are getting better Mistral is getting less and less relevant. It pains me because I want them to succeed, but despite them denying it I believe they'll end up restrict their activity to (1) selling hosting for Chinese models (they're already hosting GLM) and (2) selling AI-related consultant service (they're also doing that already). |
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| ▲ | pembrook an hour ago | parent [-] | | If there’s one thing the legacy, dying industrial companies of Europe love, it’s consulting. So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China. Which would be the most European outcome ever. | | |
| ▲ | Foobar8568 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not just legacy dying industry.
Whole IT in France and Switzerland runs on consultancy. | | |
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| ▲ | Towaway69 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Europe is at least trying Which is interesting since who are the investors and what exactly are their roles? Samsung - European? BlackRock - European? Salesforce Ventures - European? Etc. So yes it might well be > [...] the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch. but the money isn't European. |
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| ▲ | HenrikPontoppid 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | eloisant 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference. I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3. Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software. | | |
| ▲ | user43928 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it. Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers. This is supposed to be a success story? | | |
| ▲ | eloisant 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I'm sure you can tell the difference. But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough. Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started. Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments. |
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| ▲ | powerapple 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't get it when people all claim that AGI is a winner takes all game. It is not (unless it is used as a weapon). When one company reaches AGI, there will be a dozen very close to AGI, given time. Also a winner is not going to drive everyone else out of business, it is the opposite, one winner will have people betting on the second and the third winners, the technology will also help other develops. Once you have a good enough model, everything will be incremental. I think the hardware capability will be the real burden, not the model itself. If AGI is as powerful as it sounds, maybe hardware won't be a problem any more. | | |
| ▲ | AureliusMA 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s very possible that the people saying AGI is a winner takes all are indeed referring to warfare. |
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| ▲ | mondrian 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Europe is a different beast. They build and distribute rails, they don’t compete on frontier capabilities. When the civic benefits of AI become clear, EU is in a position to mandate their distribution. US develops capabilities that remain stuck in heterogeneous corporate silos without interop. Payments is a good point of comparisons between the two approaches. | |
| ▲ | Slartie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait... > so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings. | | |
| ▲ | andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? They are simultaneously first: the two leapfrog each other with regularity, and are meaningfully ahead of the competition. | |
| ▲ | whiplash451 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | OpenAI and Anthropic are so close on benchmarks and release date that they are essentially ex-aequo at this point. The market is just hedging their bets. There is no close second, because the AA Index points are expentially harder to get as you get closer to the first. | |
| ▲ | HenrikPontoppid 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The value of these companies is not defined entirely by the state of their current models. A much more important signal is their chance of having the best model in the future. Just like with anything having to do with investment, this is the castle in the sky. Also, shame on me for simplifying things so much - but I still believe in my original sentiment. | | |
| ▲ | gmueckl 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Replce "best" with "most fit for purpose" and you're right. The future won't be a one size fits all kind of deal because hardware availability constraints will eventually punish oversized models even more. I think that there's a real second mover advantage in letting others waste money on researching ultra oversized models while creating smaller and cheaper models from their learnings. |
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| ▲ | vintagedave 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's kinda damning with faint praise, but I agree, I am glad to see something. I've been disappointed in their coding ability -- it's where I'm most focused, I've built and we are selling a (specialised) coding agent -- and hopefully investment will give them the ability to achieve more in their research and model development. They have been focusing largely on government and business not consumer, which is fine. Perhaps coding is not something they want to achieve, but they do provide Codestral. It's a signal it's a market of interest to them. |
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| ▲ | 0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Europe could tell ASML to put kill switches in GPUs so Europe has leverage to "safeguard" AI deployments in other countries. |
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| ▲ | orphereus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It couldn't tell ASML to do that because ASML doesn't do chip design. | |
| ▲ | Slartie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ehm, sorry, but no, this is not how lithography works. You cannot "hide" functionality in circuitry your machines are producing if your machines' job is to shine light through a mask. You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask. | | |
| ▲ | 0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say to hide it. My suggestion is to create international AI safety rules which companies must be in compliance with if they want to buy and service ASML machines. |
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