Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

• TheJCDenton

  today at 7:26 AM

  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.

  • riffraff

    today at 7:35 AM

    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".

    • madeofpalk

      today at 9:26 AM

      The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".

    • moffkalast

      today at 8:43 AM

      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?

  • InsideOutSanta

    today at 7:33 AM

    > 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

      today at 9:05 AM

      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.

      • threatofrain

        today at 9:36 AM

        That’s true, being Oracle can be a very nice thing when you’re still trying to find your footing.

  • wraptile

    today at 9:35 AM

    Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

    • ta20240528

      today at 10:02 AM

      "What does Mistral own?"

      Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*

      *…and the Chinese equivalents.

  • TheJCDenton

    today at 9:05 AM

    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.

  • ywvcbk

    today at 7:51 AM

    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.

  • niltecedu

    today at 8:34 AM

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

  • elAhmo

    today at 9:08 AM

    Apple is a hardware company.

  • WhereIsTheTruth

    today at 9:32 AM

    One is american, the other is european

    It's the same with gaming

    When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"

    Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

  • ACCount37

    today at 9:32 AM

    Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.

    In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".

  • ulfw

    today at 8:28 AM

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

  • hkt

    today at 8:14 AM

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

    • philipallstar

      today at 8:20 AM

      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.

      • toyg

        today at 8:30 AM

        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.

        • philipallstar

          today at 8:40 AM

          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

            today at 8:53 AM

            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.

  • TacticalCoder

    today at 8:09 AM

    > 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.

  • pembrook

    today at 7:55 AM

    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.

• alexfortin

  today at 7:00 AM

  I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently).

  First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).

  I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.

  I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.

  • ywvcbk

    today at 7:53 AM

    > once they're good enough for coding aid

    The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.

• blfr

  today at 7:12 AM

  I don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.

  But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.

  • zorked

    today at 7:24 AM

    People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.

    • piyush_patel_ha

      today at 8:19 AM

      A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.

      • antupis

        today at 8:55 AM

        Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.

        • nananana9

          today at 9:26 AM

          When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.

    • blfr

      today at 7:28 AM

      It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.

      • Lapel2742

        today at 7:38 AM

        > Fable was the step change for programming.

        AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:

        > During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.

        > Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.

        > Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.

        • nicce

          today at 8:31 AM

          >> Fable was the step change for programming > AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field.

          They have released models speficially for programming that ”vibe coding” would be safer.

          https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral/

      • slopinthebag

        today at 7:30 AM

        People said this for Opus 4.6 too. Every release the models get RLHF'ed into accomplishing a new task and the people who need to do this task think there was a step change.

        • ifwinterco

          today at 7:58 AM

          To be fair Opus 4.6 was genuinely a really good model when it came out, in fact I'm not sure Opus 5 is even any better.

          It's definitely a lot slower, though

          • slopinthebag

            today at 8:10 AM

            Yeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though.

            There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.

      • raverbashing

        today at 7:48 AM

        If the choice is between Mistral and no AI, I'll take Mistral any day

        Even those old llama models were ok for coding

        Yes yes they won't be like Claude's fire and forget (until you see how many tokens you burned to write "Hello World")

  • mdp2021

    today at 8:02 AM

    > don't care about benchmarks

    You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).

    • tripledry

      today at 8:56 AM

      Genuinely interested, which ones do you think have relevance?

      If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.

• dwedge

  today at 6:44 AM

  They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

  • pavlov

    today at 7:13 AM

    After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.

    My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).

    When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.

    • ywvcbk

      today at 7:55 AM

      There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.

      Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.

      • moffkalast

        today at 9:33 AM

        Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.

    • dwedge

      today at 7:16 AM

      Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good

      • stanac

        today at 7:31 AM

        Didn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....

        • notahacker

          today at 8:36 AM

          They've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...

      • Aeolos

        today at 7:31 AM

        Did you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?

        • eloisant

          today at 9:19 AM

          Yes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.

      • oblio

        today at 7:33 AM

        Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)".

        Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...

  • BoredomIsFun

    today at 9:10 AM

    > They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

    To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.

  • mazurnification

    today at 6:56 AM

    This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.

  • dns_snek

    today at 7:29 AM

    Which provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?

  • intended

    today at 6:55 AM

    It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.

    Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

    But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.

    To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.

    • ywvcbk

      today at 7:57 AM

      > Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

      True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"

    • 21asdffdsa12

      today at 6:58 AM

      And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.

      • nickpp

        today at 8:01 AM

        Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore.

        I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.

        • notahacker

          today at 8:54 AM

          > I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.

          I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...

    • nickpp

      today at 7:56 AM

      And it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.

      • dns_snek

        today at 10:05 AM

        [delayed]

      • intended

        today at 8:56 AM

        Yes.

        This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.

        It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.

        Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.

        The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.

        Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.

        This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.

        If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.

    • blfr

      today at 7:15 AM

      Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.

      I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.

      • vichle

        today at 7:54 AM

        They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.

        • blfr

          today at 8:08 AM

          Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.

    • prolly97

      today at 7:02 AM

      There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers. Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.

      • boonzeet

        today at 7:13 AM

        There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to:

        Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases

        Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods

        Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts

        Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising

        Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial)

        The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.

        • ricardobayes

          today at 7:31 AM

          I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad.

          We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.

          Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.

          • prolly97

            today at 9:19 AM

            >Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago

            I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?

            • ricardobayes

              today at 10:02 AM

              I can quote the German BKA:

              number of crimes in 2016: 6,372,526

              number of crimes in 2025 (last data): 5,508,559

              https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...

              https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...

        • nickpp

          today at 7:52 AM

          > cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair

          Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.

          Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.

          But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".

          It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.

          • prolly97

            today at 9:31 AM

            This!!!

            I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.

            I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.

      • pdhborges

        today at 7:15 AM

        Do you believe I can't get a list of 20 effective pro-consumer regulations drafted by the EU out of Gemini?

        • prolly97

          today at 9:17 AM

          I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith.

          I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.

          Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.

        • nickpp

          today at 8:04 AM

          Maybe you should get that list from the European AI products that came from those awesome EU regulations.

      • vrganj

        today at 7:17 AM

        That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here.

        As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.

        You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)

        • prolly97

          today at 9:37 AM

          Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions? Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another. Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head. Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes. Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes.

          Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.

          I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it. I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.

• Bayart

  today at 8:58 AM

  Mistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise. Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.

• matusp

  today at 6:45 AM

  This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.

  • black_puppydog

    today at 6:50 AM

    We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

    • matusp

      today at 9:52 AM

      How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.

    • randomgermanguy

      today at 6:56 AM

      But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models.

      So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.

      Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it

      • oblio

        today at 7:36 AM

        I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something.

        We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.

        If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.

        • nickpp

          today at 8:06 AM

          > I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.

          I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.

          • ezst

            today at 9:12 AM

            Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs.

            The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-...

            The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.

          • oblio

            today at 8:57 AM

            We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated?

            Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.

    • selcuka

      today at 6:58 AM

      Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.

    • adventured

      today at 9:52 AM

      Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market?

      What moat does Google have that's so special in search?

      You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.

      OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.

      When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.

      Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.

      OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.

      Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.

    • realusername

      today at 7:08 AM

      That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore.

      And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.

      As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.

  • KronisLV

    today at 7:42 AM

    To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment.

    I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.

    I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.

    At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.

    • simgt

      today at 8:53 AM

      > I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.

      The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.

      • KronisLV

        today at 8:57 AM

        I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.

  • simgt

    today at 8:49 AM

    We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.

    • lII1lIlI11ll

      today at 9:57 AM

      > We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.

      You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

  • gman83

    today at 7:17 AM

    No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

    • lII1lIlI11ll

      today at 10:04 AM

      > Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

      Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:

      - Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).

      - Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.

      - Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.

    • grim_io

      today at 8:23 AM

      There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US.

      EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.

      • pferde

        today at 9:48 AM

        No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.

    • pferde

      today at 7:31 AM

      Thank god.

  • throw1234567891

    today at 7:42 AM

    you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?

• dzonga

  today at 7:48 AM

  I also think their business model is interesting in that they can also serve Chinese models e.g GLM and fine tune them for enterprises.

  which is a market Chinese labs won't get into.

  they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.

• bsoqk

  today at 8:43 AM

  >They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons.

  We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out.

  It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place.

  Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".

• ywvcbk

  today at 7:46 AM

  Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).

  • jillesvangurp

    today at 8:17 AM

    There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.

    The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.

    Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.

    You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.

• Eldodi

  today at 9:13 AM

  Is it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well

• catoc

  today at 7:30 AM

  With how they’re currently being used we might as well call them bendmarks.

  Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.

• mokre

  today at 8:09 AM

  How you know that they are not realy benchmaxxxing? Maybe they just have skill issue in this olimpics.

• gvieri

  today at 7:47 AM

  I tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.

  • today at 7:51 AM

• tonyhart7

  today at 7:20 AM

  are you saying current frontier AI labs is benchmaxxxing and not because the AI model is good ?????

  You crazy to think that Fable and Astra capabilities is fake

  • ahartmetz

    today at 7:29 AM

    The winning strategy seems to be actual capabilities plus cheating.

• shevy-java

  today at 6:47 AM

  I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.

  Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?

  • himata4113

    today at 6:48 AM

    Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.

    • ulfw

      today at 8:30 AM

      LOL yea as if that was the reason for LLMs

  • 21asdffdsa12

    today at 7:00 AM

    Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.

    • ulfw

      today at 8:30 AM

      Please speak English so that an LLM can understand you

    • mastermage

      today at 7:23 AM

      The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets.

      Where in the fuck did we stall out?

      • 21asdffdsa12

        today at 7:39 AM

        If life is a exponential curve, the moment we stopped overproducing exponential energy and ate the planet up for this.. that was when we stalled.

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.

• eloisant

  today at 7:08 AM

  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).

  • pembrook

    today at 7:44 AM

    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

      today at 7:46 AM

      Not just legacy dying industry. Whole IT in France and Switzerland runs on consultancy.

      • w3ll_w3ll_w3ll

        today at 8:07 AM

        Add Italy please.

        • kiney

          today at 8:25 AM

          and Germany

          • chrystianpl

            today at 8:38 AM

            and Poland

            • hoihoihoi

              today at 9:14 AM

              Korea as well :)

• BoredomIsFun

  today at 9:13 AM

  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.

• Towaway69

  today at 7:04 AM

  > 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.

• HenrikPontoppid

  today at 6:39 AM

  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.

  • eloisant

    today at 7:13 AM

    > 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

      today at 8:27 AM

      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

        today at 9:04 AM

        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.

  • powerapple

    today at 7:20 AM

    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

      today at 9:03 AM

      It’s very possible that the people saying AGI is a winner takes all are indeed referring to warfare.

  • mondrian

    today at 7:18 AM

    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

    today at 6:48 AM

    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.

    • adventured

      today at 10:01 AM

      Samsung is now essentially tied for being the world's most profitable company with Nvidia ($62b operating profit last quarter, vs $63b for Nvidia). They're drowning in cash. They're doing the same thing Nvidia has been doing: distributing the money to their business partners, to try to drive business growth faster (and or to keep it all propped up).

    • andsoitis

      today at 7:08 AM

      > 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

      today at 7:02 AM

      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

      today at 7:00 AM

      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

        today at 9:03 AM

        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.

• vintagedave

  today at 6:42 AM

  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.

• moffkalast

  today at 9:34 AM

  "Do nothing, win." is already China's strategy after all. Though they are far from doing nothing in the LLM space.

• 0xDEAFBEAD

  today at 6:48 AM

  Europe could tell ASML to put kill switches in GPUs so Europe has leverage to "safeguard" AI deployments in other countries.

  • orphereus

    today at 6:58 AM

    It couldn't tell ASML to do that because ASML doesn't do chip design.

  • Slartie

    today at 6:54 AM

    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

      today at 7:05 AM

      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.

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country.

So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

• Tenoke

  today at 9:59 AM

  > Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

  The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.

• bambax

  today at 7:56 AM

  > I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

  It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:

  https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en

  • easytiger

    today at 8:48 AM

    Do you think that's a good thing?

    • bambax

      today at 9:57 AM

      I don't know. Government funds have a unique way of being often wrong, so this may be the kiss of death. But it is a sign that the EU is helping Mistral.

    • guiriduro

      today at 9:45 AM

      Imagine the fund were distributing to several teams, but let's say Z.ai and Deepseek were european and among them. What percentage would be allocated to Mistral in that case? OK, the other two aren't, but in the same vein, should the EU fund be saving its powder until such a project shows up?

    • AureliusMA

      today at 9:06 AM

      European money invested in a European company ought to be a good thing, don’t you think?

      • Tenoke

        today at 10:00 AM

        It's possible to be a waste of European money that could be better used elsewhere, though. I think the same about LeCun's company sucking up the little funding here.

    • gib444

      today at 9:19 AM

      Do you think it's not?

• andsoitis

  today at 7:16 AM

  > LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences).

  There are also some areas where values across Europe are quite divergent. Think LGBT rights and social acceptance, religion & secularism, immigration & multiculturalism.

  And countries don’t fall into neat “liberal west vs conservative east”. Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries; Denmark is socially liberal but has adopted relatively restrictive immigration policies.

  • swiftcoder

    today at 8:42 AM

    > Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries

    When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.

    Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.

  • dist-epoch

    today at 7:50 AM

    You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing

• fallingbananna

  today at 7:42 AM

  >I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

  On a similar note: Why does it have to be the EU to step up?

  Why doesn't EU rather speed up making VC investments more attractive, so that EU and banks don't do the majority of investing?

  *I don't have answers to these questions. It just frustrates me how many investments here come from politicians and banks, rather than from investors, people, and companies.

  • AureliusMA

    today at 9:09 AM

    It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

• AureliusMA

  today at 9:08 AM

  Europe has no budget of their own like the USA and China do, because there is no debt nor taxation at the European level. That’s the reason for the complication you are noticing.

• world2vec

  today at 8:54 AM

  "Pax Sinica", Chinese Peace

• dist-epoch

  today at 7:49 AM

  > with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.

  that is being replaced with Pax Silica

  https://www.state.gov/pax-silica

  • utopiah

    today at 7:59 AM

    This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.

• pembrook

  today at 8:08 AM

  > LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same

  Your values and American values might not be the same, but to say even most of Europe feels the same way is a big stretch. And not even the US has very many shared values anymore.

  If we’re being honest, Europe doesn’t actually have much of a common value system outside of whatever is momentarily trendy in the urban monoculture, which is why it refuses to work together on most things and is currently being torn apart at the seams (see the rise of nationalist far right parties in most states).

  The EU are a collection of states where the average citizen can’t even communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a 4 year old. How could they possibly be aligned on a value system in the same way the US is.

  • AureliusMA

    today at 9:11 AM

    This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.

    • pembrook

      today at 10:03 AM

      Sorry you got emotionally upset. But can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements?

      AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less?

      The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created the worst of both worlds. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have this vision.

      Every country still identifies with their early 1900s national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem.

Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the effort that they release those models as open weight but Gemma 4 models are currently way easier to run with more tok/s and less hardware. Their API pricing is just insane for what you get. But I guess enterprise customers don't care about it, this is why they are probably not lowering it.

• BoredomIsFun

  today at 9:16 AM

  > Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B

  Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.

Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/

• swiftcoder

  today at 8:49 AM

  > Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/

  Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

  Yes, EU software Eng salaries are a lot lower than their US equivalents, but quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.

  As a concrete example, a few years back it leaked that Dan Abramov's (very decent) London salary was half what his US peers earned. Didn't seem to bother the man much at all...

  • alexey-salmin

    today at 9:26 AM

    > quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.

    Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.

    And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.

  • chrocni380

    today at 9:11 AM

    > Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

    Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.

    Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.

    Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.

    At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.

• benhurmarcel

  today at 9:46 AM

  That's pretty high for engineering in France though. Most engineers by far are way below that there, this is top management level.

• pkos98

  today at 8:39 AM

  In Germany AFAIK their Senior base salary ceiling is ~ 180k EUR - approx 210k USD for an Engineering role.

  Thats quite competitive for a base salary, as high as max ICT5 Staff base at Apple Munich.

  • pimeys

    today at 9:05 AM

    And 180k in Germany, even in Berlin is pretty good. You are living a very good life with that salary.

• kraftman

  today at 7:48 AM

  There's more to life than money past a certain point, I'd rather live in the Alps on a lower salary.

  • user43928

    today at 8:36 AM

    I imagine you could do so while working for an US AI Lab in Zurich for five times the net pay.

  • selfawareMammal

    today at 8:11 AM

    You dont even live in the Alps with 90K lmao. And if you expect top performance, you should expect top salary. Or at least something competitive. 90K for a company like Mistral is a bit embarrassing.

    • qnpnpmqppnp

      today at 8:33 AM

      €90k is in the top 5% salaries in France. Of course you can live in the Alps, or anywhere else in France for that matter.

    • kraftman

      today at 8:22 AM

      I literally do.

• scotty79

  today at 9:47 AM

  > Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive.

  It probably means they don't, they just do their own thing how they see fit.

• kome

  today at 6:58 AM

  some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...

  • tasoeur

    today at 7:00 AM

    I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

    • Towaway69

      today at 7:07 AM

      > researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

      Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.

      • clarionbell

        today at 9:01 AM

        Sort of yes. But it's nowhere near as much as some would like to believe. It mostly concerns those who have unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money.

        Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.

  • eloisant

    today at 7:20 AM

    US software companies (Google, Meta, MS, etc) have offices in Paris and they pay way more than that. Especially if you take into account total comp (Mistral is private so any stocks you get are "locked" until IPO or sell out)

    Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.

    • jongjong

      today at 7:38 AM

      When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.

      Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.

      UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.

      That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.

      I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.

      • Bayart

        today at 8:54 AM

        > When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.

        Salaries are calculated differently in France, Germany, US etc. For example working in Germany you're likely to fork a huge amount monthly to your health insurance. It actually makes it difficult to negotiate comp across borders.

        $55k USD brut in France is around 2.8k EUR / month after taxes in France, which counts as the upper bracket of Middle Class in most of the country outside of Paris. Paltry when you're used to tech comps but decent for the vast majority of people here.

        On the whole I agree that it's not competitive regionally or globally, and as for myself I'd leave for Switzerland or Australia if I had the opportunity.

      • gib444

        today at 9:35 AM

        > UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations),

        Then we got a PM, who's father in law is the founder of Infosys, who changed the law to favour the likes of Infosys (by making it too risky for smaller players to hire contractors). Scandalous corruption

        Contracting was going to be my plan for buying a better house and early retirement, but that's gone now. Thanks Rishi

  • mciancia

    today at 7:14 AM

    But you should be able to hire most of the people you want, not just some that happen to pick Paris.

    Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)

Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.

• antupis

  today at 7:14 AM

  Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.

• BenoitP

  today at 7:10 AM

  And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's.

  Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.

  • eloisant

    today at 7:14 AM

    Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.

  • dist-epoch

    today at 7:51 AM

    if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one

No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.

• w4yai

  today at 6:23 AM

  I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.

• impossiblefork

  today at 6:42 AM

  If Mistral aren't going to distill other people's large models they obviously need to train their own large models. This obviously requires money for optimization, tuning and training hardware.

• mosselman

  today at 6:24 AM

  They've started hosting GLM-5.2, that should be very telling of their capabilities at the moment. Hopefully the investment will allow them to hire the right people to become competitive.

• Raed667

  today at 6:32 AM

  can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

  • tristanj

    today at 7:55 AM

    Chinese models are trained on dubiously collected model traces from Claude/OpenAI that are purchased from model routers. All the major Chinese models use this data. That's one reason they've been able to catch up with Anthropic/OpenAI so quickly, they have so much data.

    Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.

  • alansaber

    today at 6:36 AM

    They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company

    • AureliusMA

      today at 9:16 AM

      They have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.

    • skeledrew

      today at 8:46 AM

      "Frontier" is a relative, ever-changing target.

  • chronic7304

    today at 6:35 AM

    > can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

    Culture.

    In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.

    Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

    • alansaber

      today at 6:37 AM

      Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?

      • skeledrew

        today at 8:44 AM

        There is logic to it. The ones who work 12h/day for 6d/week does more than the ones who work 8h/day for 5d/week does more than... It's simple scaling that pays off over time even if the general quality of work by the former isn't as high as that of the latter.

      • ajjahs

        today at 6:40 AM

        [dead]

      • chronic7304

        today at 6:53 AM

        [flagged]

        • InsideOutSanta

          today at 7:37 AM

          Shame them... for not working their employees into a heart attack at 40?

          I'm not sure if your hypothesis is correct. I personally don't think the crazy work hours are what make the US so competitive in tech. But even if it were, it's odd to call for shaming countries for having less insane work cultures.

        • Foobar8568

          today at 7:49 AM

          Lol, and Switzerland has high working hours, but I achieve less in 3 months than 3weeks in Paris.

          My US colleagues, like German one,just bullshit on reality of what they produce.

          Real problem is more on VC, autonomy and small companies.

        • KronisLV

          today at 8:46 AM

          > We need to start shaming individual countries in addition to blanket EU.

          Reading this gave me a visceral disgust reaction.

          I have worked in the middle of the night here to be able to ship prod fixes for meeting deadlines. But that and even overtime should be exceptions rather than the norm.

          This better be bait, in which case good job but flagged anyways. Surely nobody would genuinely make the argument that workers should be worked to the bone?

          What I personally think could help would be less bureaucracy and regulation in regards to tech advancements (while preserving privacy of individuals), so that the time is used more efficiently, alongside significant investments.

    • bossyTeacher

      today at 6:40 AM

      >inferior

      Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.

    • tokai

      today at 8:21 AM

      In reality US and China are just not efficient enough.

• alansaber

  today at 6:35 AM

  There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)

  • jhuguet

    today at 8:28 AM

    there was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something

    • ismailmaj

      today at 9:37 AM

      All original scientist co-founders of H have left.

      From what I've seen in the past few months, Mistral is the unique European lab still trying to compete (I wouldn't count Poolside as EU).

• koe123

  today at 6:45 AM

  Honestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.

  • Oras

    today at 6:52 AM

    Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.

    I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.

    • koe123

      today at 7:57 AM

      My feeling is that its a difference in how funding works in different places. The USA will go all in with the populations pensions on a gamble, the Chinese subsidize. This way of operating is typical for the EU.

      > Being one year behind is a skill issue

      E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing.

      > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,

      So it's not a skill issue?

      • Oras

        today at 8:09 AM

        > > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,

        > So it's not a skill issue?

        I meant by offering sovereign cloud/inference, not for training. But even if it was for training, Chinese labs have limited supply of GPUs, look what they've done. So it is a skill issue.

        Also to clarify, I didn't mean European engineers' skills, I meant "you get what you pay for" as a company, that's why I hope they start offering better compensation to retain talent.

    • skeledrew

      today at 8:49 AM

      Where is that skill coming from in the first place? What are they doing to attract, nurture and keep it?

    • blitzar

      today at 8:00 AM

      > Chinese models are open, available to distill

      Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.

For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.

• pimeys

  today at 9:03 AM

  They try to build them, but for example in Finland where there's cheap electricity and lot of interest to build them, the people started protesting on rising electricity prices and now the politicians are noticing this.

  Same in Denmark.

• olowe

  today at 9:27 AM

  Mistral now serves GLM-5.2: https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...

> Existing investors a16z

I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in

• 0x20cowboy

  today at 5:59 AM

  Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.

  • luplex

    today at 8:01 AM

    No, Thiel is talking about the UN and global minimum taxes when he talks about the Antichrist.

  • hallgrim

    today at 6:06 AM

    If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.

    • vlyan

      today at 6:27 AM

      to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing.

      Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.

      • vintagedave

        today at 6:35 AM

        Other than investment, such as this news?

        I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?

      • wongarsu

        today at 6:41 AM

        Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation.

        But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that

        • pembrook

          today at 7:49 AM

          On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable.

          It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.

      • __alexs

        today at 6:46 AM

        Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo.

        Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.

        I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.

    • ghurtado

      today at 6:26 AM

      Ok, so once again South Park sounds completely deranged when they let reality do the writing.

      I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.

    • BoredomIsFun

      today at 9:18 AM

      > seen as the inhibitors of progress

      I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress.

      What a load of delusion.

    • Hikikomori

      today at 7:56 AM

      Their brains were broken because the government still has the ability to say no to them in some cases.

    • shrubby

      today at 6:09 AM

      https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_fo...

      Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.

  • bayarearefugee

    today at 6:14 AM

    I think you're confused here.

    a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.

    The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.

    • speedgoose

      today at 6:31 AM

      I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?

      • bayarearefugee

        today at 6:50 AM

        Well, sure, but on the other hand Peter Thiel thinks she might be the antichrist, and he has an awful lot of money which means he is an expert on everything.

        • andsoitis

          today at 7:19 AM

          He says she’s the Antichrist because she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization. Being antichrist is an archetype.

          • georgemcbay

            today at 7:50 AM

            > she’s against progress and threatens the continued thriving of our civilization.

            How exactly does she threaten the continued thriving of our civilization?

            It is fine for people to disagree with her worldviews, but labeling her a threat to civilization is an absurd claim.

            A civilization that can be threatened by a single person's acts of peaceful protest might be doing something, but it sure isn't thriving.

      • graemep

        today at 6:48 AM

        Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely.

        Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.

      • ReptileMan

        today at 6:34 AM

        He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.

        • phtrivier

          today at 7:03 AM

          The whole "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” also hints at _something_.

          But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea.

          (Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")

        • andsoitis

          today at 7:23 AM

          > He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.

          He also expelled demons from a man and conceded to their request to be installed in 2,000 pigs. That led to them drowning, causing substantial destruction of somebody else’s property for no obvious practical necessity. The local people become frightened and ask Jesus to leave their region.

      • today at 7:14 AM

• Frieren

  today at 6:00 AM

  This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly.

  Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.

  • shrubby

    today at 6:07 AM

    The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger.

    Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.

    This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.

    • Frieren

      today at 6:58 AM

      > Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses

      Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.

      • shrubby

        today at 7:57 AM

        Yup. I tried to say that conventional taxation is not enough. As the power is hidden in Panama bank accounts we need to figure out means beyond taxation to neutralize it as it being used to obliterate the future.

    • maxrev17

      today at 6:11 AM

      Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!

      • skeledrew

        today at 8:20 AM

        It's default behavior due to scarcity. Remove that permanently and there's no longer incentive to be greedy.

  • ekianjo

    today at 7:02 AM

    > the will of the people.

    there is so such thing.

    if there is it sure is very flexible and forgetful

  • przeor

    today at 6:15 AM

    [flagged]

I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.

• alastairr

  today at 6:24 AM

  That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.

  • skeledrew

    today at 8:36 AM

    Highly improbable given China is ready to pick up any slack.

    • alastairr

      today at 8:53 AM

      That's true now, but given the strategic importance of AI to nation states and the fractious relationship many have with China, I wouldn't expect the eagerness to use Chinese AI to continue indefinitely.

• ludvigk

  today at 6:20 AM

  Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?)

  In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.

  • 0xDEAFBEAD

    today at 6:49 AM

    OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.

    • clarionbell

      today at 9:18 AM

      If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well.

      Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking.

      Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue.

      What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow.

      And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.

  • cbg0

    today at 6:49 AM

    Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.

  • slopinthebag

    today at 7:37 AM

    You'd still have access to the Chinese models though right? Even if you want to argue they aren't truly SOTA they're still pretty dang good.

• loehnsberg

  today at 6:21 AM

  Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.

  • aurareturn

    today at 6:37 AM

    Is there money in niche models?

    • catdog

      today at 6:41 AM

      Is there money in frontier?

      • vineyardmike

        today at 6:48 AM

        Yes...?

        Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?

        • mastermage

          today at 7:29 AM

          Revenue is not profit.

          https://isaiprofitable.com/

          • aurareturn

            today at 7:51 AM

            AI is profitable. Gross margins are high.

            The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.

            • debugnik

              today at 9:18 AM

              Keeping up with competition is part of trying to stay in the frontier. If they stop training the profit disappears in a few months.

              • aurareturn

                today at 9:31 AM

                The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.

                Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.

          • slopinthebag

            today at 7:41 AM

            Lol that chart is hilarious when you look at Nvidia.

            Always sell shovels in a gold rush I guess

        • pbmonster

          today at 7:34 AM

          > Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?

          No...? Of course not?

          Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?

          • aurareturn

            today at 7:44 AM

            Anthropic is growing 10x revenue every year.

            They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year.

            When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.

            • surgical_fire

              today at 8:06 AM

              > They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate.

              And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029!

              > When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.

              If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.

              If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.

              • aurareturn

                today at 9:32 AM

                  If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
                

                Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.

                • surgical_fire

                  today at 9:58 AM

                  Or they bleed money like crazy, and their margins are pretty awful. Which is the correct answer.

                  Your $200 subscription is a major net loss for them. The vast majority that pays for that would cancel in a heartbeat the moment they had to pay API prices. Which may or may not be profitable, I am not entirely sure. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is.

• koe123

  today at 6:53 AM

  They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.

It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models.

An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models.

With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.

• rhdunn

  today at 8:21 AM

  It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently.

  It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training).

  Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.

That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?

• Daunk

  today at 6:25 AM

  *losing trillions

  • bpodgursky

    today at 6:30 AM

    Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.

    • Systemerror7A69

      today at 6:44 AM

      And my wallet is thought to contain a billion dollars, so long as I don't open it.

      Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?

      • benjaminwootton

        today at 6:56 AM

        It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.

    • nesk_

      today at 7:08 AM

      If they were cash flow positive they would tell it to everyone, be sure of that.

      • tristanj

        today at 8:01 AM

        Anthropic is currently in an IPO quiet period and cannot publish such information.

    • eloisant

      today at 7:21 AM

      it's fake cash flow based on circular economy

    • mirekrusin

      today at 6:46 AM

      [dead]

• hobofan

  today at 6:17 AM

  Are they, though? I would say, let's find out when the IPO settles, but then again the market also sustains a incredibly crazy valuation for Tesla.

  • steinvakt2

    today at 6:20 AM

    If not, I’m buying stocks

    • nicce

      today at 6:28 AM

      Better to buy GPUs and RAM with current rate

• danmaz74

  today at 6:16 AM

  At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.

• shikck200

  today at 6:25 AM

  Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month.

  The bubble is going to burst soon.

  • skeledrew

    today at 8:31 AM

    I think the Pro and other subs allow them to save big on ads (Claude Code use is required and it pushes their ads) and allow easy access to free data (CC occasionally solicits feedback and session sharing, which I'm pretty sure some users oblige). Also CC does massive prompt caching tailored to work in lockstep with their platform. With all that and who knows what else, I'd say it balances over time.

I really hope that Mistral will catch up. I'm left wondering why so many Chinese labs manage to be competitive.

Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?

I'm using Mistral for a local VN Proofreader and its by far the best Local 14B Model for this specific use case.

• alex_duf

  today at 9:23 AM

  What's VN in this context?

  • JanTurnherr

    today at 9:42 AM

    A Visual Novel. Its from a Software-Engineering standpoint interesting, since the requirements for this specific Use-Case are immense.

10-20x more still needed, and then somewhere to build a couple DCs. Fingers crossed they make it, neither US nor Chinese labs can be trusted, even with open weights.

I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be enough to be used by a lot of companies and governments in the EU that are (trying to) move away from US tech.

• Traubenfuchs

  today at 6:55 AM

  > but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet

  They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.

I have used some of models of mistral, I'm liking where they're heading.

I know a lot of people who use AI, but literally nobody who uses Mistral.

Très bien! C’est parti!

Surely outfits like Sakana will be looking at a similar strategy. The White House / Anthropic spat supercharged all this.

Still no training data in sight.

Maybe we need to abolish copyright?

So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?

"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.

They are all responsible for driving up RAM prices.

I want my money back.

I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects.

Not even a phone call :(

• elvennn

  today at 6:34 AM

  I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them.

  Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.

  • selestify

    today at 7:09 AM

    Care to share any more?

• tasoeur

  today at 6:58 AM

  I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).

• colesantiago

  today at 6:58 AM

  Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral?

  Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw)

  Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.

Europes last chance

• throwa356262

  today at 6:31 AM

  I don't know.

  The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.

  • codingbot3000

    today at 9:18 AM

    "Probably safer to stay out of the race for now."

    What kind of attitude is that?

  • alansaber

    today at 6:38 AM

    Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?

  • aurareturn

    today at 6:41 AM

    I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS.

    That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.

    • Zambyte

      today at 9:20 AM

      The vast majority of people simply don't need SOTA models. I run most of my programming on a single 7900 XTX with Qwen 3.8 27b. I'm more interested in scaling out to run more instances of the model in parallel, than I am in scaling up to better models.

    • throwa356262

      today at 8:00 AM

      My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.

      • aurareturn

        today at 8:03 AM

        Impressive doesn't mean sustainable.

        We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral.

        I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.

• eloisant

  today at 7:22 AM

  On the contrary, Europe needs a wider AI ecosystem and not rely on just one company

another ponji scheme

[dead]

[dead]

Too bad Mistral fucking sucks