Comment by BoorishBears
3 months ago
Mistral is founded by multiple Meta engineers, no?
Funded mostly by US VCs?
Hosted primarily on Azure?
Do you really have to go out of your way to start calling their competition "data leeches" for out-executing them?
Mistral are mostly focusing on b2b, and for customers that want to self-host (banks and stuff). So their founders being from Meta, or where their cloud platform are hosted, are entirely irrelevant to the story.
The fact they would not exist without the leeches and built their business on the leeches is irrelevant.
Pan-nationalism is a hell of a drug: a company that does not know you exist puts out an objectively awful release, and people take frank discussion of it as a personal slight.
Those who crawled the web without consent, and then put their LLM in a blackbox without attribution, with secret prompt and secret weights -- ie. all of this without giving back, while creating tons of Co2. Those are the leeches.
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If you want to allocate capital efficiently planet-scale you have to ignore nations to the largest extent possible.
> The fact they would not exist without the leeches and built their business on the leeches is irrelevant.
How so?
It's wayyyy to early in the game to say who is out-executing whom.
I mean why do you think those guys left Meta? It reminds me of a time ten years ago I was sitting on a flight with a guy who works for the natural gas industry. I was (cough still am) a pretty naive environmentalist, so I asked him what he thought of solar, wind, etc. and why should we be investing in natural gas when there are all these other options. His response was simple. Natural gas can serve as a bridge from hydrocarbons to true green energy sources. Leverage that dense energy to springboard the other sources in the mix and you build a path forward to carbon free energy.
I see Mistral's use of US VCs the same way. Those VCs are hedging their bets and maybe hoping to make a few bucks. A few of them are probably involved because they're buddies with the former Meta guys "back in the day." If Mistral executes on their plan of being a transparent b2b option with solid data protections then they used those VCs the way they deserve to be used and the VCs make a few bucks. If Europe ever catches up to the US in terms of data centers, would Mistral move off of Azure? I'd bet $5 that they would.
I didn't mean to imply US bad EU good. As such, this isn't about which passport the VCs have, but about local hosting and open weight models. A closed model from a US company always comes with the risk of data exfiltration either for training or thanks to CLOUD Act etc (i.e. industrial espionage).
And personally I don't care at all about the performance delta - we are talking about a difference of 6 to at most 12 months here, between closed source SOTA and open weight models.