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Mistral AI Valued at $2B
- transformi 3y agoEvaluation based on what? what is the business model?
- antirez 3y agoI believe that the rationale is that if you can do an outstanding 7B model, it is likely that you are able to create, in the near future, something that may compete with OpenAI, and something that makes money, too.
- Racing0461 3y agoWith the new AI regulations the EU is going to adopt, how long will mistral be paris based?
- rolisz 3y agoMaybe the regulations will be Mistral shaped.
- Barrin92 3y agothere's nothing in the new AI regulations hindering Mistral's work. Open Source foundation models are in no way impacted. https://x.com/ylecun/status/1733481002234679685?s=20 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1733481002234679685?s=20
- Racing0461 3y agoWe both know that's not how regulations work. Mistral is going to have to get a legal team to understand the regulations, have a line item for each provision, verify each one doesn't apply to them, get it signed off and continously monitor for changes both to the laws and the code to make sure it stays compliant. This will just be a mandate from HR/Legal/Investors. Alot of work for a company with no commercial offering off the bat. And possibly an insurmountable amount of work for new players trying to enter.
- arlort 3y ago> Alot of work for a company with no commercial offering off the bat If you have no commercial offering it doesn't apply to you at all in the first place
- andsoitis 3y agoRegardless of where a company is headquartered, it has to comply with local regulations.
- Racing0461 3y agoOnly if it wants to do business there. If a company is just headquartered there, they have to comply with regulations no matter what.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kozikow 3y agoOr another way to put it - if you are an enterprise based in Europe that needs to stay compliant, future regulation will make it very hard to not use Mistral :P.
- matmulbro 3y agoLLM space is so cringe so much excitement from supply side and no excitement/cringe from supposed demand side
- huytersd 3y agoI don’t know what you’re talking about. I use chatGPT extensively. Probably more than 50 times a day. I am extremely excited for anything that can top the already amazing thing we have now. They have a massive paying customer base.
- 4death4 3y agoWhat do you use it for?
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoNot OP but I used it very successfully (not OpenAI but some wrapper solution) for technical/developer support. Turns out a lot of people prefer talking to a bot that gives a direct answer than reading the docs. Support workload on our Slack was reduced by 50-75% and the output is steadily improving. I wouldn’t want to go back tbh.
- dartos 3y agoI usually go to it before google now if I’m looking for an answer to a specific question. I know it can be wrong, but usually when it is, it’s obviously wrong
- kozikow 3y agoNot OP, but For me: - Writing: emails, documentation, marketing - Write a bunch of unstructured skeleton of information. Add a prompt about the intended audience and a purpose. Possibly ask it to add some detail. - Coding: Especially things like "Is there a method for this in this library" - a lot quicker than browsing through documentation. Some errors - copy-paste the error from the console, maybe a little bit for context, and quite often I get the solution. And API based: - Support bot - Prompt engineering of some text models that normally would require labeling, training, and evaluation for weeks or months. A couple of use cases - unstructured text as an input + prompt, JSON as an output.
- airspresso 3y agoToo many superlatives and groundbreaking miracles reported. Probably written by AI.
- jay-barronville 3y ago> In a significant development for the European artificial intelligence sector, Paris-based startup Mistral AI has achieved a noteworthy milestone. The company has successfully secured a substantial investment of €450 million, propelling its valuation to an impressive $2 billion. I’m cracking up. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to read this and immediately conclude it’s AI-generated. I mean, they didn’t even try to hide that. Haha.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoA competitor to OpenAI in like, benchmarks?
- consumer451 3y agoAt least a competitor to Llama, for now. https://medium.com/@datadrifters/mistral-7b-beats-llama-v2-13b-overview-and-fine-tuning-c608374b5c82 https://medium.com/@datadrifters/mistral-7b-beats-llama-v2-1...
- z7 3y agoMistral has a lot of potential, but there's the obvious risk that without proper monetization strategies it might not achieve sustainable profitability in the long term.
- niemandhier 3y agoThe French have a urge to be independent, the French government will hand them some juicy contract as soon as the can provide any product that justifies that.
- emadm 3y agoYeah they shouldn't worry, they'll get a big French government deal at worst
- lolive 3y agoOne of the French tycoons will eventually buy them.
- yodsanklai 3y ago> The French have a urge to be independent They lose that fight a long time ago though. It seems they don't even try to pretend anymore.
- fy20 3y agoI would say most European countries have that desire. That and the fact it can easily by fine tuned to the local language could make these models very popular outside the US.
- nothrowaways 3y agoNothing stops them from launching a chat app.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe old open source, but we'll host it for you? I think Bezos is going to be in fits of evil laughter about that model in 5 years, as all the open source compute moves to the clouds, with dollars flowing his way. But one thing Mistral could do is have a free foundational model, and have non-free (as in beer, as in speech) "pro" models. I think they will have to.
- foolfoolz 3y agothis is inevitable. at some point companies like this will be too big to fail like air bus. maybe it’s already there
- jaspa99 3y agoCurious to see how this will impact Aleph Alpha
- emadm 3y agoAleph Alpha raised even more ^_^ https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-startup-aleph-alpha-raises-500m https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-startup-aleph-alpha-raises-500...
- quickthrower2 3y agoWhat is the business model?
- hnarayanan 3y agoSshh
- quickthrower2 3y agoSorry I forgot, in AI $2Bn is preseed
- malermeister 3y agoGet the French government to throw a ton of money at you for sovereignty reasons
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoI really hope that a European startup can successfully compete with the major companies. I do not want to see privacy violations, such as OpenAI's default use of user prompts for training, become standard practice.
- quickthrower2 3y agoDoes Anthropic count as European?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- htrp 3y agoDario is italian-american?
- quickthrower2 3y agoThat doesn't matter too much, the corporate structure is more interesting.
- pb7 3y agoElon is South African but that doesn't make Tesla a South African company.
- uxp8u61q 3y agoHow on Earth would it count as European? It's a completely American company. Founded in the US, by Americans, headquartered in the US, funded by American VCs... I genuinely don't get how you arrived at the idea that it's European.
- quickthrower2 3y agoBig office and lots of jobs in UK. And with complex tax setups these days I wasn’t sure.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoThere is a lot of hype around LLMs, but (BUT!) Mistral well deserves the hype. I use their original 7B model, as well as some derived models, all the time. I can’t wait to see what they release next (which I expect to be a commercial product, although the MoE model set they just released is free). Another company worthy of some hype is 01.AI which released their Yi-34B model. I have been running Yi locally on my Mac (use “ ollama run yi:34b”) and it is amazing. Hype away Mistral and 01.AI, hype away…
- jay-barronville 3y agoYou mind sharing what you find so amazing about Yi-34B? I haven’t had a chance to try it.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI just installed it on my 32B Mac yesterday, first impressions: it does very well reasoning, it does very well answering general common sense world knowledge questions, and so far when it generates Python code, the code works and is well documented. I know this is just subjective, but I have been running a 30B model for a while in my Mac and Yi-34B just feels much better. With 4bit quantization, I can still run Emacs, terminal windows and a web browser with a few tabs without seeing much page faulting. Anyway, please try it and share a second opinion.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe 200K finetunes are also quite good at understanding their huge context.
- p1esk 3y agoHow do these small models compare to gpt4 for coding and technical questions? I noticed that gpt3.5 is practically useless to me (either wrong or too generic), while gpt4 provides a decent answer 80% of the time.
- modeless 3y ago
- minimaxir 3y agoOf course, the reason Mistral AI got a lot of press and publicity in the first place was because they open-sourced Mistral-7B despite the not-making-money-in-the-short-term aspect of it. It's better for the AI ecosystem as a whole to incentive AI startups to make a business through good and open software instead of building moats and lock-in ecosystems.
- jeron 3y agoThey ought to rename to “ReallyOpenAI”
- sillysaurusx 3y agoI don’t think that counts as open source. They didn’t share any details about their training, making it basically impossible to replicate. It’s more akin to a SaaS company releasing a compiled binary that usually runs on their server. Better than nothing, but not exactly in the spirit of open source. This doesn’t seem like a pedantic distinction, but I suppose it’s up to the community to agree or disagree.
- minimaxir 3y agoIt's IMO a pedantic distinction. A compiled binary is a bad metaphor because it gives the implication that Mistral-7B is an as-is WYSIWIG project that's not easily modifiable. In contrast, there have been a bunch of new powerful new models created by modifying or finetuning Mistral-7B such as Zephyr-7B: https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-beta https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-beta The better analogy to Mistral-7B is something like modding Minecraft or Skyrim: although those games are closed source themselves, it has enabled innovations which helps the open-source community directly. It would be nice to have fully open-source methodologies but lacking them isn't an inherent disqualifier.
- hedgehog 3y agoIt's a big distinction, if I want to tinker with the model architecture I essentially can't because the training pipeline is not public.
- asim 3y agoI have realised just how meaningless valuations now are. As much as we use them as a marker of success, you can find someone to write the higher valuation ticket when it suits their agenda too e.g the markup, the status signal, or just getting the deal done ahead of your more rationale competitors in the investment landscape. Now that's not to say Mistral isn't a valuable company or that they aren't doing good work. It's just valuation markers are meaningless and most of this capital raise in the AI space is about offsetting the cloud/GPU spend. Might get downvoted to death but watching valuation news feels like no news.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seydor 3y agoIt's smoke. but where there is smoke, there is some level of fire
- jack_riminton 3y agoNot if it's a smoke machine
- mytailorisrich 3y agoPerhaps someone can answer this: this is a one year old company. Does this mean that barriers to entry are low and replication relatively simple?
- emadm 3y agoMain barrier right now is access to supercompute and how to run it, everything is standardising quickly in the space
- cavisne 3y agoThe part of Meta research that worked on LLaMa happened to be based in the Paris office. Then some of the leads left and started Mistral. Complex/simple is not really the right way to think about training these models, I'd say its more arcane. Every mistake is expensive because it takes a ton of GPU time and/or human fine tuning time. Take a look at the logbooks of some of the open source/research training runs. So these engineers have some value as they've seen these mistakes (paid for by Meta's budget).
- JonChesterfield 3y agoAnyone else think Nvidia giving companies money to spend on Nvidia hardware at very high profit margin is a dubious valuation scheme?
- candiddevmike 3y agoIt's the heads I win, tails you lose investment model
- raverbashing 3y agoYou'd be surprised how this is much more common than people realize
- SeanAnderson 3y agoWhy would it be a dubious valuation scheme? I guess if an investor is looking at just revenue, or only looking at one area of their business finances, maybe? Otherwise it seems like the loss in funds would be weighed against the increase in revenue and wouldn't distort earnings.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoSay big green gives a company $100M with the rider that it needs to spend all that on nvidia's hardware in exchange for 10% of the company. Has Nvidia valued the company at 1B? Say their margin is 80% on the sales. So Nvidia has lost some cashflow and $20M for that 10%. Has Nvidia valued the company at $200M?
- SeanAnderson 3y agoI see :) Thanks for clarifying. I would say that I don't have a strong enough grasp on biz finances to do more than speculate here, but: 1) Is all the money spent up front? Or does it trickle back in over a few years? Cash flow might be impacted more than implied, but I doubt this is much of an issue. 2) I wonder how the 10% ownership at 2B valuation would be interpreted by investors. If it's viewed as a fairly liquid investment with low risk of depreciation then yeah, I could see Nvidia's strategy being quite the way to pad numbers. OTOH, the valuation could be seen as pure marketing fluff and mostly written off by the markets until regulations and profitability are firmly in place.
- racoonista 3y agoUnfortunately, the EU also just passed some AI regulations. Not sure how they impact Mistral's work, but just FWIW.
- malermeister 3y agoWhy is that an unfortunately? We need regulations to set the rules of the game.
- bsaul 3y agowe don’t even know what AI is truely going to look like in 2 years, and 2 years ago nobody cared. Isn’t it a bit too early to regulate a field that’s barely starting ?
- malermeister 3y agoBy regulating it now, we can shape what it's going to look like in 2 years.
- b2bsaas00 3y agoAnyone has example of products that made large use of LLM API that could make economics sense to use self-hosted model (Mistral, LLAMA)?
- sroussey 3y agoIm working on embeddings database of my personal information, and ability to query it. Just a privacy reason.
- Frummy 3y agoThat's fair given it's 50 times more difficult to use their model
- fidotron 3y agoThere is a lot of noise here suggesting it is too much, but relative to the supposed SV unicorns of two years ago this looks like an absolute steal.
- yreg 3y agoThe macroeconomic situation 2 years ago and now was wildly different.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoPerhaps too much off-topic, but I hate how the press (and often the startups themselves) focuses on the valuation number when a company receives funding. As we've seen in very recent history, those valuation numbers are at best a finger in the wind, and of course a big capital intensive project like AI requires a valuation that is at least a couple multiples of the investment, even if it's all essentially based on hope. I think it would make much more sense to focus on the "reality side" of the transaction, e.g. "Mistral AI received a €450 million investment from top tech VC firms."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shrimpx 3y agoThe valuation is meaningful in the sense of "Mistral sells 22.5% of company to VC firms."
- nojvek 3y agoValuation means Jack shit for early stage startup. WeWork was valued at $50B at its peak. Until a company is consistently showing growth in revenue and a path to sustainable profitability, valuation is essentially wild speculation. OpenAI is wildly unprofitable right now. The revenue they make is through nice APIs. What is Mistral’s plan for profitability? Right now stability AI is in dumps and looking for a buyer. Only companies I see making money in AI are those who live like cockroaches and very capital efficient. Midjourney and Comma.ai come to mind. Very much applaud them for open release of models and weights.
- evantbyrne 3y agoValuation matters quite a bit for continued funding.
- hauget 3y agoHis point is with regards to reaching & maintaining profitability, not revenue spending.
- evantbyrne 3y agoIt's too early for Mistral to focus on revenue. These AI companies are best thought of as moonshot projects.
- toss1 3y agoYes, and it can matter in a very bad way if you need to subsequently have a "down round" (more funding at a lower valuation). Initial high valuations mean the founders get a lot of initial money giving up little stock. This can be awesome if they become strongly cash-flow positive before they run out of that much runway. But if not, they'll get crammed hard in subsequent rounds. The more key question is: how much funding did they raise at that great valuation, and is it sufficient runway? Looks like €450 million plus an additional €120 million in convertible debt. Might be enough, depending on their expenses...
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- wholien 3y agohow does Mistral monetize or plan to monetize? create a chat gpt-like service and charge? license to other businesses?
- nojvek 3y agoGotta give it to Nvidia and TSMC. In the big AI race, they’re the ones with real moat and no serious competition. No matter who wins, they’ll need those sweet GPUs and fabs.
- Yujf 3y agoIts the good old "in a gold rush, sell shovels"
- ThalesX 3y agoMy 1st thought as an European, "YAY! EU startup to the moon". My 2nd thought was "n'aww, American VC". I guess that's the best we can do around here.
- paulddraper 3y agoIt may feel that there are few EU startups and that's true. But there are even fewer EU VCs.
- ThalesX 3y agoWas CTO for some European startups. I'll always remember one when by the time the EU VC was mid-way through its due dilligence for 500k seed, we already had some millions lined up from some US VCs no questions asked.
- jamesblonde 3y agoThe problem is that no European VC has that amount of capital. European VCs typically have a couple of hundred million under mgmt. SV VCs have a few billion under mgmt.
- jchonphoenix 3y agoIndex Ventures has the money. But the truth of the matter is that even most US VCs aren't willing to shell out 2B valuations for a company with no revenue.
- bsaul 3y agoThere were european VCs investing in the very first round, french one in particular. Founders are french. This qualifies as european in my book (let’s not get too demanding)
- firebot 3y agoWho comes up with these valuations? The Donald?
- eeasss 3y agoSome folks on this forum seem to get irritated by the prospect of a successful AI company HQed in the EU. Why the hate?
- sofixa 3y agoBecause many around here have a preconceived bias that Europe cannot be innovative, and any proof to the contrary needs to be shat upon as not good or innovative enough/only looking for government contracts, or that they're not the size of Meta or Alphabet or Apple so obviously they aren't really innovative, or some other goal post shifting exercise.
- yodsanklai 3y agoNoob questions (I don't know anything about LLM, I'm just a casual user of ChatGPT) - is what Mistral does better than Meta or OpenAI? - will LLM become eventually open-source commodities with little room for innovation or shall we expect to see a company with a competitive advantage that will make it the new Google? in other words, how much better can we expect these LLM to be in the future? should we expect significant progress or have we reached to diminished returns (after all, this is only statistical prediction of next word, maybe there's an intrinsic limitation of this method) - are there some sorts of benchmarks to compare all these new models?
- nbzso 3y agoThe old Masters have a saying: Never fall in love with your creation. The AI industry is falling into the trap of their own making (marketing). LLM's are nice toys, but implementation is resource/energy expensive and murky at best. There are a lot of real life problems that would be solved trough rational approach. If someone is thirsty, the water is the most important part, not the type of glass:)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIf you compared the efficiency of steam engines during industrial revolution with the ones used today, or power generation from 100 years ago to that of now, or between just about any chemical process, manufacturing method or agricultural technique at its invention and now, you'd be amazed by the difference. In some cases, the activity of today was several orders of magnitude more wasteful just 100 years ago. Or, I guess look at how size, energy use and speed of computer hardware evolved over the past 70 years. Point is, implementation being, right now, "resource/energy expensive and murky at best" is how many very powerful inventions look at the beginning. > If someone is thirsty, the water is the most important part, not the type of glass:) Sure, except here, we're talking about one group selling a glass imbued with breakthrough nanotech, allowing it to keep the water at desired temperature indefinitely, and continuously refill itself by sucking moisture out of the air. Sometimes, the type glass may really matter, and then it's not surprising many groups strive to be able to produce it.
- nbzso 3y agoDon't fall in love with your creation, is not stop creating. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00365-3 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00365-3
- qeternity 3y agoI see a lot of comments asking what or how people are using these models for. The promise of LLMs is not in chatbots (imho). At scale, you will not even realize you are interacting with a language model. It just happens to be that the first, most boring, lowest hanging fruit products that OAI, Anthropic, et al pump out are chatbots.
- gnabgib 3y agoPreviously: OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2B Valuation with Andreessen Horowitz Backing (6 days ago, 2 points, 0 comments)[0], OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2B Valuation with Andreessen Horowitz Backing (5 days ago, 9 points, 1 comment)[1], French AI startup Mistral secures €2B valuation (2 days ago, 106 points, 74 comments)[2], Mistral, French A.I. Startup, Is Valued at $2B in Funding Round (6 hours ago, 15 points, 1 comment)[3] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522873 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533725 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580758 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38593526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38593526
- vinni2 3y agoDupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580758
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoLet me say this. Whoever is going to be able to let "normal" Mac users to install and run a local copy of an LLM, is going to reap tons of commercial benefits. (e.g. DMG, click-install, run. No command line). It is nuts to me that we have 100M computers capable of running LLMs properly, and yet only a tiny fraction of them does. Heck, let us do p2p, and lend our computing power to others. Let us build a personalized LLM. This is, IMHO, a really interesting path forward. It seems no one is doing it.
- abrichr 3y ago> Whoever is going to be able to let "normal" Mac users to install and run a local copy of an LLM, is going to reap tons of commercial benefits. (e.g. DMG, click-install, run. No command line). https://gpt4all.io https://gpt4all.io https://ollama.ai https://ollama.ai
- throwaway09799 3y ago$2B is super cheap when ChatGPT wrapper AI startups are worth $500M.
- Alifatisk 3y agoThat’s insane how much money is flowing is between these investors and startups