Comment by michaelkdev
6 hours ago
Even if it's not the best model, it can be really important step in UE sovereignty. Trained in EU, inference in EU. I guess it will matter for some companies. Hope Mistral won't disappear for the next half year.
6 hours ago
Even if it's not the best model, it can be really important step in UE sovereignty. Trained in EU, inference in EU. I guess it will matter for some companies. Hope Mistral won't disappear for the next half year.
For sure, as an EU based company we will only use US suppliers for coding but never for fuctions in our own products. Mistral knows this.
But coding/development is way more important. That's where the IP goes straight into the next training dataset.
I’d guess their concern is their user’s data that is probably part of providing the AI features.
But what about all those enterprise agreements?
> But coding/development is way more important
This isn't 2016 anymore.
the greatest threat to Mistral is that there isn't a deep and large enough capital market in the EU to absorb the valuation step ups needed by the handful of EU sovereign growth investors to justify their existence.
you could say, that's perpetually a tomorrow problem, so long as they never go public, but that should illuminate for you: if everyone "knows this," it's inevitable that this so-called EU company, that didn't invent any of the AI, the hardware nor the training data, where their product is essentially more like a VPN provider than a frontier technology company, just lists and capitalizes in the US anyway.
Seems some AI they did invent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49243397
By your measure anyone unable to build EUV lithography machines without ASML help is doomed. EU could easily corner the market and shut them all off. No more NVIDIA.
Let’s grow the pie, shall we?!
there is truth to the scarcity of EUV solutions, although I am more radical, I don't think there's really scarcity of ANYTHING except real estate, physical or metaphorical. that said this little rinky dink patent... Mistral is not ASML. Never was, never will be. you are welcome to read into the dynamics of EU capital markets.
honestly the craziest thing to me is that VC people in the EU, they say, let's grow the pie, and when you look at their little decks with their little flags next to the portraits, it's french, german, italian, spanish, all piling into the same 40 or so companies, which will 110% list in the US in order to exit. Meanwhile, EU member Poland produces tons of entrepreneurs, despite no Polish flags in those growth fund decks, and its best people just leave to the US and raise money there and make fabulously successful stuff.
so yeah, "grow the pie" except for Poland. EU relitigating the same feuds it has been for centuries.
Sovereignty over what though?
The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course.
But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed.
It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage.
Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist.
Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.
it's industrial policy, which is of course the minimum for being able to even think about having independent thoughs when it comes to international relations.
hard to stand up for EU (or even national) values if some dude in Washington has the keys for most of your military
having at least some in-house expertise is the first step.
I agree, but my point is I don’t think we should be cheering on a group of 600 million highly educated people struggling to achieve the bare minimum.
We should be shaming them into contributing something useful to the rest of world in the most important development of our current time (AI) instead of clapping for domestic regulatory moats.