Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
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.
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".
Mistral is doing one more thing: building up local know-how in the European ecosystem. This is worth more than money, you can't bootstrap an industry overnight.
There are a bunch of Europeans working in the top labs abroad. We do not lack any know how, we only lack the raw amount of capital invested in doing private research, since our companies cannot thrive and compete globally due to regulations. Mistral would be much bigger if it was founded in the US.
Or it would be gone. Or it would be in the hands of psychopaths. Europe trades off the extremes for a better middle. It doesn't produce quite as many big names, but US and EU economies are roughly the same size.
Ah, interesting I always thought USA’s GDP far ahead, but it’s not. Compared to EU it’s 20 vs. 30 trillions/y. Adding Switzerland, UK, etc. and it’s close.
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".
Is that really part of Apple’s strategy? They have recent examples of moving a whole bunch of stuff that requires a lot of research in-house. You’ve got stuff like their silicon, cellular modems, Vision Pro, the health business, etc.
Really Apple is pretty R&D heavy when it comes to their hardware business.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Apple sees itself as a consumer solutions provider first while a lot of the companies in the AI race are heavily focused on B2B.
The frontier AI model race is about being the first to be able to sell solutions to companies that will replace their workers and make their workers more productive.
But for B2C, the value potential just isn’t there, which is why Apple isn’t chasing it.
And now you’ve got the Mac mini/Mac Studio situation where Apple is better off selling pickaxes.
Whatever they do will take 2 to 4 years and I think they will do something to permanently solve their memory problem and I think it will be no different than solving their processor problem (Intel) or their long-term modem problem (Qualcomm).
Let Google spend $185 billion, and Microsoft spend $140 billion thru the end of this year on AI model building and AI hardware.
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?
I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models.
I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
I don't think any Mistral model can match an open 30B-sized Qwen from a year ago, so right now they're not really a competitive alternative to anything at all. Except Voxtral perhaps, but that's very niche.
> 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.
In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened.
Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable if they hadn’t had a whole continent of wealthy customers, and no competition.
I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.
Can I still get Google Adsense payments when Google has my European bank account and address if there are sanctions or something like that? Can I still login to my Cloudflare account and manage a domain registered with them? Will I lose access to Outlook or Gmail? Should I rely on Claude at all?
But the problem isn't if I can bypass sanctions, use VPNs, etc, or even if a company wants or can legally do that... it's the fact I'm asking these questions at all. It's not something I'd ask 15 years ago about US companies.
It doesn't happen overnight, but the adversarial behaviour of the current administration and the tariffs really changed the perspective about America on many Europeans.
The discussion about building European alternatives had never been so mainstream. If and once they emerge, I think the shift will happen. But let's see
2 years is not a long time. What I’m telling you is that sentiments have changed dramatically, and every government and company board across the continent is taking actions to position itself according to those sentiments.
You won’t see the full effect of that for at least a decade, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
It's a slow shift, but it's coming. For instance, Airbus already picked a French AWS replacement (Scaleway). It won't be all, it won't be tomorrow, but "what happens if we get tariffed / they invade Greenland" is already part of everyone's disaster planning.
The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk.
It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible in the next couple of decades and Europe will accelerate their decoupling. It’s also possible we continue to slide into imperialist authoritarianism (and Europe definitely accelerates their decoupling).
This is what I mean: Americans don’t understand the immense dividends they have enjoyed from being the defacto symbol of “progress” in the 20th and 21st centuries so far. American solutions were chosen by European customers because they were reliable trading partners with an air of modernity. Homegrown was seen as the antithesis to leapfrogging into the future.
People celebrated when McDonald’s came to their country or town. Not anymore.
I'm not sure if it's really a "trump agenda". The ideas didn't start with him, the people who voted for said ideas aren't going to suddenly disappear, and this is his second term.
It looks more like part of the new normal from the outside, and that's why things are changing. A country can't go from reliable to unreliable partner every 4 years without any consequences.
Even the people that voted for Trump didn't sign up for this, which is why his approval ratings are terrible even by historic standards. He didn't run on a platform of "attack Canada and suck up to Putin". Most Americans are very pro-European. Most of the voting population has living memory of the cold war.
As to what happens post-Trump, it's anyone's guess. I expect a hard reset. Markets have short memories, as they say.
Not to the same extent, but during his first term, his administration had issues with Canada, Mexico, Europe/UK, NATO, China, etc. Tariffs were a thing back then already. And he was elected again. Clearly it wasn't a huge issue for those who are bothered to go out and vote.
In any case, for everyone else, it's the second time in 10 years that they have to play the waiting game until it's over. It's good to be optimistic, but when you're in charge of a country, you can't just plan for the best and rely on hope alone. Same if you run a company or and even with services you as individual use.
Regarding memories, I don't know about the markets, but in Europe I think it will take a few years for everyone to forget that in 2026 Denmark had to transfer blood reserves to Greenland and that different European countries deployed tripwire forces because of... the US of A. Do you know who triggers similar responses? Russia, when they start saying that their borders are fluid.
2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough
1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap
2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability.
Most deployments don't need AGI
In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it.
Example:
Case of a hospital flooded in emails.
You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest.
If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance
Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"
Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
China's model for decades has been to do it cheaper and then do it better for cheaper. Just accepting this makes you an economic vassal state. We've seen this play out over decades now with other industries. I'm not blaming China for this approach, but if you want to stay relevant, then you need to compete.
You don't need to view China as some scary boogeyman who's going to use AI to attack you or w/e the current conspiracy is. They just need to continue peacefully outperforming while everyone else gets fat and lazy.
The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.
We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it.
Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do.
But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely.
I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security.
But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having.
This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
Any model, even an open weight one, is fundamentally an encoding of a way of viewing the world.
What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.
Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.
I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default and that's why the sovereign part is important.
Is there a specific concern you have, and what kind of performance penalty is it worth to you on say coding tasks?
Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competitive but has this alignment is the solution, rather than accepting an inferior one.
I think for coding tasks, it probably doesn't matter as much. I'm more worried about stuff like chatbots subtly pushing or normalizing a certain world view.
I think I'm not the only one that's had this revelation, recall the Llama4 announcement. [0]
> It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.
> Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models
This goal of course is self-defeatingly impossible to achieve. There is no unbiased, there's always only an unbiased relative to the bias of the observer.
Phrased differently, models weren't right leaning enough for the American oligarchy class and they publicly shared their desire to change the ideology they perpetuate.
I think an important perspective to keep in mind here is Zizek, the philosopher who's dedicated his life's work to the functioning of ideology.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
-- Slavoj Zizek
My concern is that both the Americans and the Chinese will be aligning their models more and more ideologically and that they will function as the perfect propaganda machine - surface-level objective and unthreatening, but answering every question asked from a world view decided elsewhere.
For some tasks (like aforementioned coding), that won't matter and there we can use whatever model is most capable. But as we outsource more and more of our thinking to AI and use it more and more to educate impressionable young people, not having our own models will mean not getting a say in how societies views are shaped and perpetuated.
Imagine for example, the question: "What caused the French revolution?" There's many answers that might be technically correct. Which ones get emphasized is where ideology lives and gets perpetuated.
Since there is no unideological, the best we can do is a pluralism of ideologies building LLMs. To not build one representing your views is for your views to not be represented.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
Ah, yes, it is really baffling that Mistral, a new European AI startup, is held to a different standard compared to a unique, 50 year old, software + hardware, 4.5 TRILLION dollar market cap company. A truly mystery of our times.
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.
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
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.
True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts.
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies
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".
They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.
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.
I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently).
First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).
I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.
I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.
The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.
My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).
When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and
Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.
There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
We heard this since Uber days and all it did was break the old taxi systems and brought taxi service to a wider audience. As a consumer I benefited immensely from Uber.
Likewise for AirBnB and hotels.
Not saying that these don't have secondary effects on the society - but as a consumer they were and arguably still are pretty amazing.
You benefitted temporarily. Those offering the service are often worse off. Various regulatory bodies had to beat these companies into submission, that no, you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits. After the competition is murdered, they will raise their prices over and over again.
All these companies thrive on the externalization of costs and killing an economy to then use their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.
Me and quite a few others are getting real tired of the constant name-dropping of mega-corporations that do not care about your safety, health, or well-being. This does not resonate with anyone except a small circle of wealthy tech elitists.
If they can make a profit from those things, great, but they will also not hesitate to make a profit from your suffering as well. Ask the lung doctors of the people living next to xAI's data centers if their patients are better off than before.
I think in this case, the contract workers are the ones taking the L, generally. Taxis are not overpriced just from a lack of competition, but because they are an actual full time job with all that comes along with it, and not well.. part time gamified bullshit where you fight for scraps.
Most of the does EU has Uber now, and Wolt and some others, so it's not like we avoided anything there in practice though.
Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good
They've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...
Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)".
Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
Ah, "Americans are awful. Now we can be just awful"
> they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
So I guess Anthropic called for banning Chinese models when they said "but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."? - [0]
May be they imply it? They work behind the scene for it? well, who knows. My guess is as good as yours. But since we're acting like a child, bending the truth is allowed?
By the way, China is decisive. They just banned outright Claude and Open AI. I guess no open arguments about regulation is good?
> I would just ban US software companies like China did (I'd obviously also ban Chinese software companies, too). The resulting chaos would end up with some pretty solid EU software companies, the know how is there.
I'm all for following positive examples, as long as we keep democracy. We don't need to copy everything, just the good parts.
> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
Regulation != censorship. (Apart from that, Mistral has Shieldstral[0] for adding policy enforcement).
With it's general approach of Open Weights, and being able to be deployed on-premise (/private/public cloud), they are a viable solution for your typical European enterprise, that has to comply with traditional (non-AI) regulation. With the NIS2 directive the amount of those companies is also significantly expanding.
We[1] are in the same market as Mistral, and among our customers, the go-to-solution of MS Copilot is typically performing badly, and the typical SaaS solutions are not even given a consideration, which is why they are reaching for on-premise-first solutions.
They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy.
Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.
Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore.
I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
> I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...
But Boeing and Airbus kept desiging and building new and improved planes.
There are multiple aircraft manufacturers for smaller aircraft, and there are several showing up for electric aircraft today.
For jets, the capex required to build them is massive, and its never going to have an upstart just up and build a jet.
The regulations in place are the reason why its safe to fly, and airlines have the safety records they do.
This is the degree of safety end consumers want to be reassured that its safe to fly. The checks and balances in places create the market that you are hoping to give over to cheaper upstarts.
The market doesn't exist without that safety regulation.
See how people feel uneasy when flying Boeing after the decay of their engineering and quality culture became public knowledge.
> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
That's not true. EU regulations like the AI Act and Digital Services Act have different obligations and requirements for large and small businesses and that amount can't be zero because being a small business doesn't give you a free pass to cause damage to society.
I'd be curious to hear about specific examples of AI regulation that affect small businesses without a good reason.
Not having regulation is also "not free" because it imposes external costs on the rest of society. The goal of regulation is to reduce these external costs and instead impose them on the people (broadly) responsible.
This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.
It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.
Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.
The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.
Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.
This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.
If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
> Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care.
> Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
Financial markets are highly regulated. They are one of the most structured markets out there.
The outcomes in all those markets, whether they are good or bad, is a direct result of how the markets are structured.
The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was a direct result of regulators being defanged and underfunded for multiple years.
If you look at technology: innovation amazing in the era of unlimited horizons, the era of "move fast and break things."
However, the cost of externalities from inventions like social media, were not captured in that market structure. This means that firms can absolutely pollute or addict people in the information economy, capturing the profit but socializing the costs.
The ability of dominant players to consume/acquihire upstarts and keep their market position, is a drag on innovation and consumer outcomes today.
The situation that was faced in the early days of a new technology is different than what is faced in its maturity, when the advantages of the nimble upstart give way to the massive overlord.
At each stage, you have to craft the incentives and rules to ensure you achieve the outcomes you (as a nation) actually priortize.
Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.
I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.
They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.
These are effective monopolies competing to become super monopolies - the period leading up to dominance by one or two is beneficial to consumers with freebies and cheap offers that also completely lock out any smaller players.
If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers.
Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.
I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad.
We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.
Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
Awesome!
But, looking at the numbers the decrease in totals are due to fewer registered "street crimes", less fraud and legalization of cannabis (removing a 183k comparable from 2016).
Violent crimes however went from 193,542 to 212,335. With rapes almost doubling, going from 7,919 to 14,454 (82%). Murders remained stable though.
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem.
I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair
Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.
Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.
But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".
It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
> But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not
that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not just a race to the bottom. The idea of a free for all market is an utopia that doesn't exist ... thankfully.
He's stating a fact that you don't dispute.
You follow up with hyperbolic language; "eating rotten food" (as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety).
In a market that has been designed to let people take part in voluntary transactions, we also design methods for making sure that the counterpart takes responsibility, and delivers the agreed amount quality of product.
If you purchase a car that won't turn on, you're in your good right to make a claim against the producer. Same for all the other things you mention. And people do.
You're making a point about negative externalities. Agreed that a factory shouldn't just be able to poison a river, because there's no tangible cost to piping your dirty water to one. Here it makes sense to make artificial interventions, in my opinion.
I never tried to dispute the fact, I'm disputing the idea that we should be free to opt out of benefits that have been agreed as the minimum requirements to do business in a society. I would actually go further and argue that allowing that freedom would lead to everyone being worse off. Having minimum standards in a society gives a solid foundation on which to build, can't think of any society that doesn't have them.
A way more interesting conversation would be where to regulate, how much, for how long, what impacts would it have in innovation, etc not that I want to be free to get sold broken goods.
> as if anyone would purchase their goods from purveyors known to disregard food safety
How would you know they disregard food safety if there's no regulation on what food safety means?
The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.
You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.
The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.
The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.
Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.
I went to California earlier this year.
In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be.
It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good.
It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.
I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
I’m not sure that’s a function of regulation but more a function of most modern freezers defaulting to -18°, where an American or industrial freezer is -22 to -28°C.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
And it's not as if there aren't a bunch of somewhat arbitrary regulation in the US either.
But the general sense I got from the US, was that people still feel agency to improve their reality, and that there's fewer artificial barriers to that end.
(Except for building houses in California. omg. That sounds like a horrible horrible process. At least for those I spoke to).
I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith.
I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.
Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
- the overregulation narrative conflates two different problems
- and that you minimized too much the consumer benefits of EU legislation
I think the overregulation problem olis less that we have 200 EU regulations and we need to hack and slash 100 of them and more that we have 100 national regulations 25 are exact transcriptions of EU directives, 25 are transcriptions with tweaks and the other 50 are national scoped regulations and what we need to do is to make them uniform so that companies don't have to deal with 27x75 problems.
I'm a bit burned by politicians using the overregulation narrative and then not specifying a single example of a meaningfull rule that they would get rid of. Usually what is left in the air is that worker rights and consumer rights should be cut.
That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here.
As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.
You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)
Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions?
Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another.
Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head.
Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.
I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it.
I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.
> (48) The extent of the adverse impact caused by the AI system on the fundamental rights protected by the Charter is of particular relevance when classifying an AI system as high risk. Those rights include the right to human dignity, respect for private and family life, protection of personal data, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and of association, the right to non-discrimination, the right to education, consumer protection, workers’ rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, intellectual property rights, the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the right of defence and the presumption of innocence, and the right to good administration. [...]
> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,
> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.
> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy
I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.
>They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons.
We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out.
It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place.
Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".
I don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.
But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.
A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.
Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.
When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.
It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:
> During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.
> Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.
People said this for Opus 4.6 too. Every release the models get RLHF'ed into accomplishing a new task and the people who need to do this task think there was a step change.
Yeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though.
There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.
Yep same with latest Claude models - code isn't really any better than Opus 4.5/4.6, but use 5x as many tokens doing random stuff that's mostly unnecessary.
And yeah still for some reason they often can't understand how to set up any project locally without handholding, which is something you'd think an LLM would actually be good at
People fawn over AI brands now like cars and it's silly. OpenAI and Anthropic have been flipping spots for best LLM coder for the last two years and to say one is better feels silly; I've been using them both and they're very similar with different personalities. Recently Grok has become competitive in many aspects, and while I don't have much experience with Gemini it seems to come and go in terms of coding quality.
Saying only anthropic models are competitive frontier coding models is out of touch with the space imo
Genuinely interested, which ones do you think have relevance?
If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.
It can be subjective, at this stage of product availability.
Personally, I hate to be frustrated by gross intellectual faults, so I did some research in the past about the best benchmarks to assess pure (simulated, apparent) intelligence. (The quality of the found benchmarks may not reflect what the models seem to do in practice, so one's experience should be compared to the raw numbers out of the benchmarks.) Good ideas emerge in the field: it was proposed and discussed on these very pages that the LLM should be able to solve "murder mysteries", for example (alongside the pattern recognition problems in which IQ tests consist, etc.).
Moreover, the LLM shall not delirate. It is an intrinsic issue with the current architectures (they do not mirror the "Foundational theory of Knowledge", which requires confidence values and relations of foundation between notions), but it is a problem with more or less presence per model. Artificial Analysis has introduced a metric for that.
Moreover again, I want an output style that works well for the purpose - must not be a clashing style like "youngspeak" ("like, awsome") or "paternalistspeak" ("when a planet likes another very much they are attracted...") or "sycophantspeak" ("your question is so deep and interesting") or "wetspeak" ("you can do it, feel this not that")... So, for example, I very much preferred Kimi k2 to gpt-oss-120b. I doubt there are benchmarks for this - "seriousspeak", "maturespeak" - but there should be.
This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.
We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs.
The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
> all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children
Actually, they don't. First of all they want livable conditions for themselves. Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
I remember during communism which failed to even feed and clothe us - but The Party kept telling us that we were actually winning and we were so morally superior to those "corrupt capitalists". This is what happens when ideological justifications replace rational thought.
> Ecologism is a hobby for people with full bellies.
Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies. On average, too full, even.
Ecologism is also a hobby for people that don't want their kids to starve, as people living in Mesopotamia around the time of Akkad, or people around the Sea of Aral starting in the 1980s have discovered.
> Almost the entire planet where this debate is raging, is the part of the planet where people have full bellies.
Exactly. And most of the pollution happens in the other part.
We’re crippling our economies and render our companies uncompetitive to merely export environmental effects around, while pushing our voter base to the extremes.
All for naught too, because when the orc armies come (attracted by our weakness to even defend ourselves) they will do the the environment what they did in Ukraine…
> And most of the pollution happens in the other part.
Where does it happen exactly?
> All for naught too, because when the orc armies come (attracted by our weakness to even defend ourselves) they will do the the environment what they did in Ukraine…
Who are the orcs here? Russia? Europe is rearming like it's the 1980s.
How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.
Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market?
What moat does Google have that's so special in search?
You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.
When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.
Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.
Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment.
I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.
At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
I haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.
> I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
In the long run a planned economy is a huge disadvantage, the Soviets and now the the CCP are prime examples. For instance, the CCP is also sitting on a bunch of practically empty metropolises, paired with a property bubble and a falling population (all of which are exist to their meddling).
I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.
No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:
- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).
- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.
- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.
Power is the easy part; the hard part is where the check comes from.
One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.
The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.
With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.
We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.
> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.
You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.
Mistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise.
Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.
Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.
The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.
Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.
You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.
"something that will work reliably and predictably for years" is not really the class of product being sold, unless you're using a fine-tuned SLM to do something like classification. The vast majority of work being done with AI unfortunately benefits from being run on the biggest/best model.
So they are parasites on sovereign blah blah blah.
And yes , Chinese models will be cheaper compared to what they offer , as well as American models will be much smarter polished . This is the only market they have , lobby sovereignty among politicians.
With how they’re currently being used we might as well call them bendmarks.
Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.
Then your choice is either a US mega corp under the Trump partial dictatorship shitshow or a Chinese model distillation factory that could turn on you at any second.
I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.
I tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.
> they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs.
Yeah, spot on.
I'd add they are also betting on building specialized AI's targeting narrow yet very profitable segment markets, where general AI's à la AnthroOpenAI don't work very well.
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.
Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets.
