Comment by JumpCrisscross

> What exactly are you trying to say here?

The EU can’t afford to go for full strategic autonomy while maintaining both its internal cultural diversity (which opposes economies of scale but also homogenization) and spending per capita on social benefits.

Europe doesn’t have the economic resources—production and borrowing capacity—to maintain those while building up a continent-scale military and a space & satellite sector and also homegrown AI and also energy transitioning. Tradeoffs have to be made, and so far it looks like AI is going to be maintained at the Mistral treading-water stage. (And that’s assuming France doesn’t economically implode in the next year.)

Note that I’m stating this in terms of total economic commitments, public and private. Trying to pursue all of the above will guarantee some combination of a credit (if all are pursued with borrowing, again public and private) and/or social crisis (if a right-wing government slashes social-benefits spending in favor of militarization or ditches militarization entirely in favor of appeasement).

China grants up to 200% tax deduction on intangible assets acquired through R&D. Means your spending on AI training fees becomes a tax return amount or like appears as a magical donation deductible on the books. I don't know if DeepSeek is benefiting from exactly such a system, but that's generally how aggressively China seeks its advantages in high tech R&D.

Nobody else is or has been that aggressive. France on a Monday morning would be like $10b for Mistral in 3 years, and that'll be it. China is like $10b every year for 5 top companies for 5 years. Not necessarily to say such an all-in-doubling-down-always moves would be necessary or correct, but there is that kind of substantial funding disparity between China and the rest of the world.

I understand Mistral compared to DeepSeek Flash is less intelligent, late, more expensive, and a third of the speed.

Equivalent might be stretching it.

My teenage son summarized Mistral in one sentence:

"Mistral is so bad, it's the only model my school doesn't bother to block"

never seen anyone using Mistral's models.

> Also, in practice the EU has its deepseek equivalent model in Mistral.

In practice, European companies don’t use Mistral.

First acknowledge the reality, then we can propose solutions.