Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier
mistral.ai165 points by kuberwastaken 2 hours ago
165 points by kuberwastaken 2 hours ago
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?
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.
It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.
Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.
To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.
And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
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 are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight yet close-to-frontier models. China has have very strong models that can run locally, for example.
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models.
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
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.
Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.
When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.
Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.
Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait...
> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing
So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.
That's kinda damning with faint praise, but I agree, I am glad to see something. I've been disappointed in their coding ability -- it's where I'm most focused, I've built and we are selling a (specialised) coding agent -- and hopefully investment will give them the ability to achieve more in their research and model development.
They have been focusing largely on government and business not consumer, which is fine. Perhaps coding is not something they want to achieve, but they do provide Codestral. It's a signal it's a market of interest to them.
Europe could tell ASML to put kill switches in GPUs so Europe has leverage to "safeguard" AI deployments in other countries.
Ehm, sorry, but no, this is not how lithography works. You cannot "hide" functionality in circuitry your machines are producing if your machines' job is to shine light through a mask.
You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.
Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.
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.
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?
They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
> 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?
> Holy oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
If you live in France, Germany, Estonia, UK, just walk outside and look at employees leaving their offices?
We need to start shaming individual countries in addition to blanket EU.
>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.
There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
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.
> Existing investors a16z
I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in
Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
I think you're confused here.
a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.
The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.
I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?
Well, sure, but on the other hand Peter Thiel thinks she might be the antichrist, and he has an awful lot of money which means he is an expert on everything.
Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely.
Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.
He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing.
Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo.
Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them.
I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
Other than investment, such as this news?
I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation.
But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
Ok, so once again South Park sounds completely deranged when they let reality do the writing.
I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.
https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_fo...
Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly.
Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger.
Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.
This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
> Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses
Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!
I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be enough to be used by a lot of companies and governments in the EU that are (trying to) move away from US tech.
> but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet
They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.
I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.
That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.
They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.
Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?)
In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.
Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.
Is there money in niche models?
Is there money in frontier?
Yes...?
Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
*losing trillions
Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.
And my wallet is thought to contain a billion dollars, so long as I don't open it.
Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?
It’s thought to be because it’s a private company but it’s very well cited.
Are they, though? I would say, let's find out when the IPO settles, but then again the market also sustains a incredibly crazy valuation for Tesla.
At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month.
The bubble is going to burst soon.
So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?
Très bien! C’est parti!
"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.
They are all responsible for driving up RAM prices.
I want my money back.
I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects.
Not even a phone call :(
I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).
Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral?
Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw)
Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them.
Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.
Europes last chance
I don't know.
The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS.
That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?
Too bad Mistral fucking sucks