Comment by TheJCDenton
6 hours ago
When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
The two companies have read the market the same.
It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?
From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?
I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.
Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.
Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.
It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.
Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start.
They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
What’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?)
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
5 replies →
Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.
> ..but you're comparing apples to oranges.
Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals.
I’ll get my coat.
Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?
"What does Mistral own?"
Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*
*…and the Chinese equivalents.
Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.
1 reply →
Apple is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison
Apple and Mistral are not in the same market.
Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.
Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).
Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.
They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading.
Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.
Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.
It's a mistake when Apple does it too, they're back in the same situation they were with Google Maps in the early iPhone days.
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
One is american, the other is european
It's the same with gaming
When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"
Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
> When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"
Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
Well Microsoft’s PR machine is working overtime then because I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft doing this until this HN thread whereas Sony was everywhere on social media
One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.
Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM.
Which is smart move
Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.
In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
Apple is a hardware company.
Lmao imagine saying Mistral and Apple are in the same position.. wtf.
AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies
I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.
They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
2 replies →
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?
In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.
Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.
Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.
Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.