Comment by v3ss0n
7 hours ago
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
7 hours ago
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
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.
You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.
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?
Chinese models are trained on dubiously collected model traces from Claude/OpenAI that are purchased from model routers. All the major Chinese models use this data. That's one reason they've been able to catch up with Anthropic/OpenAI so quickly, they have so much data.
Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.
It's dubiously collected data the whole way down. This is the AI industry.
They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
They have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.
"Frontier" is a relative, ever-changing target.
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> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
Culture.
In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.
Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.
Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
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Brand new account, only 1 comment.
Checks out
>inferior
Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.
In reality US and China are just not efficient enough.
There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
there was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something
All original scientist co-founders of H have left.
From what I've seen in the past few months, Mistral is the unique European lab still trying to compete (I wouldn't count Poolside as EU).
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.
Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.
I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
My feeling is that its a difference in how funding works in different places. The USA will go all in with the populations pensions on a gamble, the Chinese subsidize. This way of operating is typical for the EU.
> Being one year behind is a skill issue
E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing.
> I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
So it's not a skill issue?
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Where is that skill coming from in the first place? What are they doing to attract, nurture and keep it?
> Chinese models are open, available to distill
Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.
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