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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*losing trillions

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.

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

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.

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”).

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.

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.

I don't know.

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