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Mistral is funded in part by Lightspeed Venture Partners a US VP. But there are a lot of local French and European VPs involved. The most famous one is Xavier

Mistral is funded in part by Lightspeed Venture Partners a US VP. But there are a lot of local French and European VPs involved. The most famous one is Xavier Niel, who started Free/Iliad a French ISP/cloud provider and later cellphone provider that literally decimated the pricing structure of the incumbent some 20 years ago in France and still managed to make money. He’s a bit of a tech folk hero, kind of like Elon Musk was before Twitter. His company Iliad is also involved in providing access to NVIDIA compute clusters to local AI startups, playing the role Microsoft Azure plays for OpenAI. France and the EU at large has missed the boat on tech, but they have a card to play here since they have for once both the expertise and the money rolled up. My main worry is that the EU legislation that’s in the works will be so dumb that only big US corporations will be able to work it out, and basically the legislation will scare investment away from the EU. But since the French government is involved and the guy who is writing the awful AI law is a French nominee, there’s a bit of hope.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
They also have the EU protectionism card which is pretty safe to assume they will play for Mistral and the Germans (Aleph Alpha) - and thus also for Meta (for the most part). Iirc the current legislation basically makes large scale exceptions for open source models.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Nobody is better at innovating in protectionism than the EU. EU MEPs work hard to come up with new ways of picking winners.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    Given how much consumer protectionism Americans and others have thanks to the EU's domestic protectionism, it is certainly a mixed bag at worst. In a strange way it's almost akin to how soviet propaganda in the cold war played a role in spurring on the civil rights movement in the states.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

They also have the EU protectionism card which is pretty safe to assume they will play for Mistral and the Germans (Aleph Alpha) - and thus also for Meta (for the most part). Iirc the current legislation basically makes large scale exceptions for open source models.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Nobody is better at innovating in protectionism than the EU. EU MEPs work hard to come up with new ways of picking winners.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Given how much consumer protectionism Americans and others have thanks to the EU's domestic protectionism, it is certainly a mixed bag at worst. In a strange way it's almost akin to how soviet propaganda in the cold war played a role in spurring on the civil rights movement in the states.