Comment by lanthissa
5 hours ago
mistral was never competitive and is getting less so, but that doesn't matter they cant be allowed to fail and have a long time to find their lane. They're smart and have an audience of like 600m people and the largest governments by spending who would use them if they were good enough.
I wonder if they could’ve caught up to Qwen & Gemma by now by now distilling them?
If their best cloud-run offering is far more intelligent than the laptop Gemma / Qwen than nevermind
I would speculate that the purpose is not just to have a domestically owned model that’s as good as the Chinese one, but for the investment to be used to build a domestic industry of people that know how to do it themselves, so as not to rely on foreign parties, so it doesn’t have to be better, just has to be good enough.
I love this point
If you're a European AI lab and you see you can't compete with the Amerikans on compute or spending, and the Chinese are open sourcing their LLM work and keeping the Amerikans honest, then there's no real need for you to focus on LLMs