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Comment by dwedge

24 days ago

Mistral has set off my stink test for a while now, they seem to be a "friendly EU AI provider" who are really an EU mouthpiece for regulation and stifling competition instead of actually innovating

Edit: downvote if you want, but here's another example: "Companies selling artificial intelligence models in Europe should pay a "levy" to support cultural industries, the head of French developer Mistral said on Friday, March 20." https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/20/m...

6 comments

dwedge

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Roark66  24 days ago

This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here and the very first question I have is "who would decide which cultural industry representatives would get the money"? And what right the decision makers have to decide that. How about they send few k EUR a month to my friend who is a struggling painter :-D

Somehow I doubt that will happen.

It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.

Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.

  • dwedge  24 days ago

    > This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here

    > It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.

    I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...

  • realusername  24 days ago

    > It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.

    They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)

shakna  24 days ago

Mistral aren't an EU mouthpiece. They're a startup backed by Microsoft, nVidia, and Salesforce.

realusername  24 days ago

They all do that, when OpenAI reached a licensing deal with Reddit, it's to prevent less financially capable competitors to enter the market. (And I'm not saying that's right either)