These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees.
EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves.
I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure.
I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.
Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have.
Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.
In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term.
At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term.
Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
Unless/until there is a risk that the chips themselves are backdoored and trying to exfiltrate data, European companies that host in Europe still solve a big problem for use of certain data in Europe.
It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.
> Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
American designed. The GPUs are made in Taiwan, the RAM in South Korea, using machines from the Netherlands' ASML.
True independence is indeed hard and expensive. But it's also not the job of Mistral to tackle all the layers at the same time, not even the state-owned corporations of western Europe in the 20th century (and the EU isn't (yet) even a state) tried to tackle every stage of an industrial process by themselves.
If the EU can't rely on Nvidia everything must have broken down already, no advanced semiconductor today could be produced by one country only. Unless there's some alternative to ASML and Zeiss the EU is part of that chain.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And if I'm processing personal data, the threat profile of sending that to a US-based company for inference is very different than the threat profile of sending that data to the EU to run on American chips. One is almost certain to end up in the hands of US government agencies and has a low but real probability to end up in training data or a data breach. The other is has much less immediate threats to my data
> That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.
No, just really hard. Tackling one problem and thinking it done is the same error as taking one step and thinking you've climbed Mount Everest; the converse is the same, just as one cannot climb Mount Everest without the first step, one also cannot become independent without making the first independent replacement for one the links in the chain you rely on.
Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United States. I think you are also underestimating the power of regulation. Not all European businesses have to be all-in for Mistral (or another alternative) to survive. This is one reason so many countries still have domestic defense, aerospace, and even automobile companies.
AI companies will find other ways to make money before global geopolitics find a new status quo. For the coming years, it seems like a perfectly fine business model.
China isn't going to be friendly any time soon and so far America seems to be getting more in rather than less hostile. It wasn't that long ago that an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.
> ... an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.
Was a scenario? Isn't it still a possible scenario?
As far as I know, the President of the United States has never formally recognized and apologized for this blatant violation of the UN Charter Art. 2.4.
For all we know, in the absence of this realization, the US is still plotting to violate the territorial integrity of Denmark.
Swiss & Monaco regulated industries can't use US models, nor clouds legally. Not just banking, there is a large part of business data holding identifiers that can't cross borders, military can't be too dependent on foreign hostile powers. If they would be purchasing, they would go for such tailored solution. Things like that add up.
Some of the use may be legal requirement, some is sponsored (as I would expect French government to do, to some extent EU), some are simply moral moves from >95% of the mankind not living in US who watch the news at least a bit. US isn't that big in many regards and its actively harming its reputation daily to the point there is little left.
This phrasing disregards the value of those traits. For example there are very clean and nice public restrooms at my local park, they may be objectively better products and I use them sometimes, but I usually use the one in my house.
I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action.
I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can.
After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality.
Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.
I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice.
Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.
I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
That ruthless review prompt seems interesting, would you be willing to share it? I've been trying to have Claude act as a reviewer for me and it feels like it never will disagree.
There is also risk from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed.
Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade…
See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. It's quicker than taking off the case of your phone and putting on a new one.
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
Indirectly I use Mistral daily: I like Proton’s Lumo private chat and that runs on Mistral technology. Something like Lumo is very much good enough to replace search and general information browsing and for me is very practical.
What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something.
I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.
I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.
I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.
Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy.
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train.
Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.
Is this scenario far fetched? Just as Nations pay large companies to build a factory in their country, Nations will similarly pay AI companies to build a national AI model for their own consumption because AI is that beneficial.
It's a risk, but since they have training expertise they should be able to distill the best open source models to reach at least approximate parity comfortably. Frontier model territory looks increasingly out of reach for anyone without $100B for training and then you have to serve inference to recoup cost, that's an expensive proposition in EU.
...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'.
Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones?
I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all.
What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?
I don't know their strategy but I wish they would double up on the open source ecosystem by sharing their innovations like Chinese labs do and use the ones shared as well. I think models in the range of 50B - 250B still have a lot of room to grow and presumably compute to train them should be more accessible than multi-T parameter models.
This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.
While that may be slightly better than being dependent on Washington, I still don't like it. Everyone is now AI-crazy. If you go to clown-channels such as the war industry or the crazy Palantir guy who wants to ruin everyone, you see that they dream of AI controlled mega-drones wiping out cities. That's the next "evolutionary" step; you can already see video footage of how much drones changed war. And these guys all push for more, more, more. I now understand why Trump keeps on making so many wrong decisions - he is being showed war-videos and sells it as a promotional agent. That's his main job; for anything else other than promo he has no competence.
> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris
Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it.
Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?
These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees.
EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves.
I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure.
I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.
> We have a few more picky customers in Germany.
Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have.
Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
> For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional
They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.
It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.
I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money.
These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term.
At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term.
Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
Unless/until there is a risk that the chips themselves are backdoored and trying to exfiltrate data, European companies that host in Europe still solve a big problem for use of certain data in Europe.
It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.
Particularly if you’re in a regulated industry, “not American” and “not Chinese” _do_ provide value; they reduce risk.
In particular, the framework under which European companies can transfer data to US companies at all is beyond fragile.
> Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
American designed. The GPUs are made in Taiwan, the RAM in South Korea, using machines from the Netherlands' ASML.
True independence is indeed hard and expensive. But it's also not the job of Mistral to tackle all the layers at the same time, not even the state-owned corporations of western Europe in the 20th century (and the EU isn't (yet) even a state) tried to tackle every stage of an industrial process by themselves.
Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
For Mideastern countries, it is paying off. For European countries, remains to be seen
If the EU can't rely on Nvidia everything must have broken down already, no advanced semiconductor today could be produced by one country only. Unless there's some alternative to ASML and Zeiss the EU is part of that chain.
That's right. So if everything is already broken down, so will Mistral.
That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And if I'm processing personal data, the threat profile of sending that to a US-based company for inference is very different than the threat profile of sending that data to the EU to run on American chips. One is almost certain to end up in the hands of US government agencies and has a low but real probability to end up in training data or a data breach. The other is has much less immediate threats to my data
> That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.
No, just really hard. Tackling one problem and thinking it done is the same error as taking one step and thinking you've climbed Mount Everest; the converse is the same, just as one cannot climb Mount Everest without the first step, one also cannot become independent without making the first independent replacement for one the links in the chain you rely on.
Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United States. I think you are also underestimating the power of regulation. Not all European businesses have to be all-in for Mistral (or another alternative) to survive. This is one reason so many countries still have domestic defense, aerospace, and even automobile companies.
AI companies will find other ways to make money before global geopolitics find a new status quo. For the coming years, it seems like a perfectly fine business model.
China isn't going to be friendly any time soon and so far America seems to be getting more in rather than less hostile. It wasn't that long ago that an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.
> ... an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.
Was a scenario? Isn't it still a possible scenario? As far as I know, the President of the United States has never formally recognized and apologized for this blatant violation of the UN Charter Art. 2.4. For all we know, in the absence of this realization, the US is still plotting to violate the territorial integrity of Denmark.
It is not a good business model _long-term_.
but, if you are lucky, you can but enough time to become competitive in that sector.
Swiss & Monaco regulated industries can't use US models, nor clouds legally. Not just banking, there is a large part of business data holding identifiers that can't cross borders, military can't be too dependent on foreign hostile powers. If they would be purchasing, they would go for such tailored solution. Things like that add up.
Some of the use may be legal requirement, some is sponsored (as I would expect French government to do, to some extent EU), some are simply moral moves from >95% of the mankind not living in US who watch the news at least a bit. US isn't that big in many regards and its actively harming its reputation daily to the point there is little left.
This phrasing disregards the value of those traits. For example there are very clean and nice public restrooms at my local park, they may be objectively better products and I use them sometimes, but I usually use the one in my house.
It is a good business model when the differentiator is that your company doesn't have just two modes:
1. Starting shit.
2. Thinking about starting shit.
At least in the EU people are willing to pay more for fewer features so long as the two mentioned points are not the entire strategy.
I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action.
I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can.
After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality.
Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.
I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice.
Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.
I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
That ruthless review prompt seems interesting, would you be willing to share it? I've been trying to have Claude act as a reviewer for me and it feels like it never will disagree.
There is also risk from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed.
Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade…
See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. It's quicker than taking off the case of your phone and putting on a new one.
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
Indirectly I use Mistral daily: I like Proton’s Lumo private chat and that runs on Mistral technology. Something like Lumo is very much good enough to replace search and general information browsing and for me is very practical.
What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something.
I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.
I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/
I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.
I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.
Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
There's pretty good consumer protection in the EU. I imagine consumer protection routes probably would apply here.
Definitely not really acceptable though nonetheless; you're a paying customer / subscriber that got 'scammed'...
You should have asked the bank to do a chargeback of the transactions.
I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy.
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes
The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train.
Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.
Is this scenario far fetched? Just as Nations pay large companies to build a factory in their country, Nations will similarly pay AI companies to build a national AI model for their own consumption because AI is that beneficial.
It's a risk, but since they have training expertise they should be able to distill the best open source models to reach at least approximate parity comfortably. Frontier model territory looks increasingly out of reach for anyone without $100B for training and then you have to serve inference to recoup cost, that's an expensive proposition in EU.
...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
I think it’s important to note that, at least for now, Mistral uses the big American cloud providers for inference [0].
[0] https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors
Yes and they are open about it. That is why they are building their own data centers in Paris and other places.
I hope Mistral will not fall for the Forbes kiss of death.
That's... not that much money. Anthropic's supposedly worth $380 billion.
LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'.
Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones?
I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all.
What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?
I don't know their strategy but I wish they would double up on the open source ecosystem by sharing their innovations like Chinese labs do and use the ones shared as well. I think models in the range of 50B - 250B still have a lot of room to grow and presumably compute to train them should be more accessible than multi-T parameter models.
This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.
While that may be slightly better than being dependent on Washington, I still don't like it. Everyone is now AI-crazy. If you go to clown-channels such as the war industry or the crazy Palantir guy who wants to ruin everyone, you see that they dream of AI controlled mega-drones wiping out cities. That's the next "evolutionary" step; you can already see video footage of how much drones changed war. And these guys all push for more, more, more. I now understand why Trump keeps on making so many wrong decisions - he is being showed war-videos and sells it as a promotional agent. That's his main job; for anything else other than promo he has no competence.
> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris
Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it.
Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?