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> It’s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing — it’s only around a month old — but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models u
by dopamean 3y ago
> It’s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing — it’s only around a month old — but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as well.
Unless I missed it elsewhere in the article this part really glosses over something I have a hard time understanding. 113M seed round at a 240M valuation for a company that has no product yet and a plan to build something like something else that already exists. This feels insane to me.
- constantcrying 3y ago>This feels insane to me. Maybe. But there seems to be a reasonable investment case. Especially if the EU is making stupid laws, being the "European AI" company seems quite valuable.
- mach1ne 3y agoMaybe there’s enough money in Europe that investors who were anxious to join the AI train jumped the gun. Indeed the whole thing is sketchy.
- papruapap 3y agoSpeech 100, at least the ceo have job security. Jokes aside, I wonder why people think that public available means copyleft.
- Nasrudith 3y agoTo be frank my first instinct is "slush fund" from the start just because they are appealing to nationalism first. Starting off with a thought terminator is a mark of a deceiver. Edit: I mean would you expect anything less than a slushfund or grift from an "America AI" project?
- elcomet 3y agoThey're investing in the team, which I think is smarter than investing in an idea. Those people built llama at meta and flamingo/chinchilla at deepmind.
- dopamean 3y agoI get that. Call me old fashioned but if I were investing a hundred million dollars I'd like the team to build _something_ for me first. Maybe that's why I dont have a hundred million to invest lol.
- ivalm 3y agoIt costs like $50M to build a next gen model, so if what they want to pitch is training next gen models it makes sense they get $100M to try. Similar to Hippocratic AI $50M seed raise. If anything this founder team seems more legit.
- iancmceachern 3y agoInteresting, what is the bulk of the cost? Programmer labor? Data center time?
- dougSF70 3y agoGPU...H100 arent cheap and you need lots of them. And some where to keep them cool.
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoRE: Hippocratic AI, interesting Forbes piece about the founder out a day or two ago https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/lawsuits-allege-this-startup-ripped-off-millions-from-vendors-andreessen-horowitz-backed-the-former-ceos-new-company-anyway/?sh=17a786683268 https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/lawsui...
- ivalm 3y agoI talked to Munjal and team when they were ideating on Hippocratic, even he acknowledges that healthiq was a shit show. AFAIK it was 30 people running a 1k person call center and failing. This motivated Hippocratic as they think they can do AI-based call center replacement because they were so burned out of running human-staffed call centers. I think Hippocratic is interesting because their leadership is business focused and not very technical, while a lot of other new foundational model cos are led by technical people. I’m curious how this shakes out.
- hospitalJail 3y agoWhat makes this different from what stabilityAI is doing?
- rjzzleep 3y agoLooks like the crypto grifting moved on the generative AI.
- konschubert 3y agoEU politics.
- TechBro8615 3y agoThis is total speculation, but maybe there is some kind of deal with the French government on the table.
- geodel 3y agoSomewhere in their offices they be putting quote from Neils Bohr to pat on their back :) We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.