Comment by aborsy
9 hours ago
It’s interesting that a French company can compete at international level to some extent, given the regulations, labor laws and generally the business unfriendly environment. I suspect they capitalize on the preference of European governments to use EU products, but might be wrong.
This comment is ridiculous. France's economy is bigger than 90 % of "unregulated" countries.
European regulations help protect from USA's tech monopolies. French labor laws and social security and state-funded scientific schools helped build one of the most competent international AI scientist generation.
All of europe got crushed by the US on the domain of internet. "Regulated" or not.
You would be surprised that many regulations are lobbied by American companies to secure their dominance. From gambling to advertising. European regulations are not to help citizens. But to help big institutions.
Indeed, French labor laws and their downstream effects have pushed the most talented French researchers to US-based frontier labs, thus building one of the most competent cohorts of international AI scientists.
This has more to do with the humongous amounts of money sloshing around in VC funds and the disproportionate importance of the US in the global financial markets. They just followed the money. Those who are successful in securing funding then tend to come back eventually.
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Do you really believe this? Lol
Could you please elaborate what labour law drives the labour out of france?
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Its not ridiculous but accurate. You right the scientist generation is huge from europe but many leave europe… Brain drain in france is huge nowadays because of what op states.
And if you look at mistral biggest customers it would be lying not to say they are done through political ties. No shame in saying that. US gov and agencies created FAANG through those same mecanism
I have yet to see someone recommending Mistral for anything tbh.
Their Voxtral[1] speech models are really good.
[1] https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral
+1 for this, I've found Voxtral to be the best combination of price/speed/accuracy.
We are using it for "old-fashioned" use cases (sentiment, classification) for some clients here in Europe. Mistral Small 3.2 8bit is good enough for most well-defined cases.
It may just be greenwashing to check “AI sovereignty” off the list.