When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

The two companies have read the market the same.

It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.

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riffraff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.

Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".

	▲	moffkalast 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?

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InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.

It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.

	▲	etiennebausson 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start. They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.

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TheJCDenton 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading.

Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.

Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.

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elAhmo 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is a hardware company.

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ywvcbk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.

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niltecedu 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.

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ulfw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies

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hkt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.

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philipallstar an hour ago | parent [-]

They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.

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toyg 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.

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philipallstar 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.

	▲	noir_lord 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts. It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;). Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either. Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point. When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want. For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.

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TacticalCoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?

In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.

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pembrook an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.

Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.

Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.