8 ms·

I truly do not see the USP for Mistral other than being based in EU. It's former USP of setting up their models on-premises for clients is now moot with the pro

• armarr 1y ago
  Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful? Especially with how
  • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful? With government agencies and some large enterprise? NO, it doesn't need anything more than being European, though I fully expect each EU government will then want its own in-house AI in order to launder some taxpayer money to the right consultancies with ties to political parties. With consumers on the open free market? YES it needs a lot more than just being European, since without any tariffs or regulations, consumers will always vote with their wallet for the best product and best value for money they can get, no matter where it comes from, no matter the geopolitics. Period. See Chinese made TikTok. And if you look in the CONSUMER tech product market, it's been captured by US SW & HW, and Chinese HW with some Japanese presence. Other than Spotify, EU products are notoriously absent form the consumer tech industry since they couldn't out-innovate the US and they couldn't cost-cut China, so they got squeezed out.
    • pegasus 1y ago
      Strange to assume an open free market and no tariffs in today's political climate.
      • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        Tarifs on AI software? Who? When? Where? I'm talking about the present not making up streamen since that goes nowhere as anyone can make up anything.
        • pegasus 1y ago
          There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. We are in the middle of a tariff war, in case you didn't notice. Hardly a strawman...
          • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
            >There's been a lot of talk on European tariffs on US software services. If political talks were cookies I would have died of diabetes 500 times by now. Show me actions, not political posturing and virtue signaling to gain applause from the unwashed masses. Because the EU has been talking about digital sovereignty for 10+++ years now and nothing close to what the US has came out of it. Only more talks and more bureaucracy. But let's say they will actually do it, how are they gonna tariff US tech when it's being sold from Europe by EU companies? When my EU state buys AWS and Office 365, they don't buy from Amazon and Microsoft Seattle so you can tariff them, they buy from Microsoft Dublin and Amazon Luxembourg, both EU companies. That's why EU's tariffs on US tech are actually the fines they issue regularly on big tech companies. You make laws with a barrier so impossibly high (like having to eliminate "hate speech" in maximum 10 minutes since it was posted) that only your local companies can clear because they're small or absent in things like social media, and then the fines start rolling like off a money printer.
• tos1 1y ago
  I generally share your skepticism, but didn‘t DeepSeek prove that one does not need a „competitive advantage“ in hardware? And if that does not hold for HW, it likely also doesn't hold for energy.
  • thiago_fm 1y ago
    Hardware is definitely extremely important. Dig more into the topic and you'll understand where all those chips sold to Singapure went to.
    • rfoo 1y ago
      Spoiler: they went to Thailand.
  • menaerus 1y ago
    The competitive advantage of DeepSeek IMO were the engineers. Some pretty hard-core optimizations went out of their lab, and this is what I think is a major differentiator between success and failure. You can have all the HW you can wish for but if you don't have the right set of people you're not gonna make it. Many companies think that they have the right set of people but they don't.
    • vintermann 1y ago
      If they do, who says they get to keep them? Hell, even if they do get to keep them, who says they're the still the right set of people in 5 years? Mistral seems clearly sensible to keep around for some powerful and wealthy people, and I have no problem seeing why. They might not even all be Europeans.
  • 0x008 1y ago
    Probably it’s not about gaining a competitive advantage but more about bringing down the costs to run frontier models in the EU to a level where it’s a viable enough option to bring down the risk of relying on the US and china entirely.
• armarr 1y ago
  Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?
  • bakugo 1y ago
    Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.
    • XorNot 1y ago
      I'm pretty sure Europe doesn't want to cede AI development entirely to China.
      • bakugo 1y ago
        Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future. If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.
        • Urahandystar 1y ago
          Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?
          • debdut 1y ago
            Not even coding, in most stuff, Mistral models are as embarrassing as LLaMa, because they’re actually just LLaMa
        • willvarfar 1y ago
          That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.
• beernet 1y ago
  While I tend to agree, the other players (Anthropic, OAI, Google) don't have super unique USPs compared to one another, either. Just to be fair.
  • elAhmo 1y ago
    I was about to post something similar. Sure, there are preferences and power users are aware which model does things better for their workflow, but for an average user, just giving them a chat box and any latest model from any of the providers would be adequate. They might notice a thing or two being different, but at the end of the day there is almost no sticking point once you take out chat history out of the equation.
    • rvnx 1y ago
      Claude Opus 4.1 is way above the others in terms of quality of the answers (especially for programming)
      • elAhmo 1y ago
        That might be your experience. I also prefer Claude for my tasks, but for general usage they are very close. Leaderboards like LLM arena show this and effectively rank all latest models within 20-30 points, which is almost a coin flip. 30 point difference in Elo rating is ~55%/45%, so out of 11 answers, you might prefer 6 from best model, and 5 from worst.
        • jasonjmcghee 1y ago
          It's crazy how different my personal experience is compared to LLM Arena. Very curious what the use cases people are doing that aren't overlapping with mine.
      • croes 1y ago
        I play code ping pong between multiple AIs to get some decent code. They all fail at some point
• scrollaway 1y ago
  A frontier lab being “behind” doesn’t really matter because a lot of the work done by those labs - the rnd - is only proven useful once released and the releases end up letting other frontier labs catch up. The play is either “dear god let me be first to market and have 8bn users” or something else. OpenAI is now playing both camps as they’re pushing hard on b2g now. But it’s a terrible idea for govs in europe to create a dependency to OpenAI. There’s a likely world where 90%+ of eu govs sign with Mistral and that is a perfectly fine outcome for the investors imo.
• adcoleman6 1y ago
  Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?
  • 0x008 1y ago
    Not even just for on-premise deployments, even for cloud settings. Google has demonstrated that you can profit very much from having your own specialized AI chips to bring down cloud costs. Maybe the EU with all the talks about giga AI factories is also planning to go in that direction instead of continuing to rely on overpriced NVIDIA chips.
  • lonelyasacloud 1y ago
    Given current leaderships; it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where access to leading AI models from the US or China could be cut-off, restricted or otherwise compromised. ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China. In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.
• mrtksn 1y ago
  What is the USP of the countless others? They even converged on API. Being in EU is actually a rather strong USP with history happening. Just the other day Korean workers building a factory in US were detained and publicly humiliated and sent back. At some point there will be an incident where ICE/TSA or military deployed to as a police will kill a family member(a mother that doesn't speak English, a father that looks islamic etc.) of prominent researcher or entrepreneur and the compensations will need to go even higher to convince that it’s worth the risk(like the people who work at refineries in warzones). Most of the AI researchers and developers are foreigners, some very prominent of them are Europeans and when the risk with Trump is realized it will be very important having place for them to return and this is a huge upside.
• ojosilva 1y ago
  Except that the risks of running open models from dubious, misaligned foreign sources (China primarily) make it nearly impossible for the enterprise to plug it into their infrastructures today. It's so easy to plug/poison a backdoor into these models, it's not even funny! OTOH, Mistral may be confronted with the fact that enterprises are slow adopting tech, slower in conservative UE, and that for the time being, the current AI offering is already diverse, confusing and not time-tested enough to justify the investment in in-house GPU datacenters.
  • DrPhish 1y ago
    Model back doors feel like baseless fearmongering. Something like https://rentry.org/IsolatedLinuxWebService https://rentry.org/IsolatedLinuxWebService should provide a good guarantee of privacy and security.
    • amelius 1y ago
      But what if the model is used to write parts of the kernel?
  • croemer 1y ago
    s/UE/EU/ ;)
  • 0x008 1y ago
    Do you have any examples of such backdoors or research papers which explain how that would work?
    • pegasus 1y ago
      I've encountered papers demonstrating such attacks in the past. GPT-5 dug up a slew of references: https://chatgpt.com/share/68c0037f-f2c8-8013-bf21-feeabcdba534 https://chatgpt.com/share/68c0037f-f2c8-8013-bf21-feeabcdba5...
    • sublimefire 1y ago
      Dataset poisoning is a thing, it is a valid risk that needs to be evaluated as part of rai. Misalignment is also a risk. Just go through Arxiv for a taste.
• decide1000 1y ago
  They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.
  • spookie 1y ago
    Agreed. Also, companies tend to prefer having someone else bound by a contract run their AI services. That way they are safe from scandals, by having a scapegoat, and do not spend time doing something orthogonal to their expertise.
  • rvnx 1y ago
    They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding
    • hirako2000 1y ago
      Is there any source you could reference. Really interested. It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
      • bpavuk 1y ago
        and every LLM is a "fork" of Google's Transformers architecture. everything is a "fork", if you give it a serious thought.
    • hexo 1y ago
      isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration
      • portaouflop 1y ago
        It’s piracy all the way down
• ktallett 1y ago
  I understand your thoughts regarding pace but I don't think that places like ChatGPT will improve at the same rate especially if their rather disappointing recent release is anything to go by. Hardware can be bought or rented, and AI talent isn't US centric or anything, it exists in many industries and will easily be found. Any knowledge that is missing will be learned. Possibly even better than competitors as there are many flaws in existing options. Many USPs are out there, from focused use cases, to accuracy all of which could be extremely useful.
• asim 1y ago
  Eventually with all technology you realise we need regional localised players who can cater to the regulations and nuances of those markets. Yes we'll continue to have global providers of AI technology like OpenAI but it's vitally important to have local players which over time might just offer a better experience to the EU or wherever else. We cannot be continually dependent on the US for everything. This also means we're not going to see it at the scale of revenue and valuations or fundraising as the US and thats ok. It's important not to try play the same game e.g burning all the funding on GPUs and high compensation. Spotify, Adyen, etc have proven their worth starting in the EU. Even in the UK there are specific companies that cater to banking, ride hailing, etc and we need to keep some of that tech local. I think this also goes down to the infrastructure level of technology, cloud and AI which we haven't done enough of. And maybe even mobile and AR glasses.
  • debdut 1y ago
    AI slop
• saubeidl 1y ago
  Even if it were only that, that is an incredibly strong USP for the world's second largest economy. As recent US actions have shown, digital sovereignty is more important than ever. It's better to be the undisputed leader in the second largest economy than to duke it out for the largest one.
• apexalpha 1y ago
  That USP seems pretty important in todays world. What if Trump suddenly block export of new models unless we kiss the ring? Russia and China have long had a similar strategy of keeping domestic competition alive, even if it initially is behind the foreign competitors. See VK.com and stuff. As a European: all for it!
• simion314 1y ago
  They focus also on supporting well languages from Europe, and they are not anti open source.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• ttoinou 1y ago
  The pixtral models are quite good and fast. They might be on par with gemma 3
  • iamnotagenius 1y ago
    They are different. Gemma 3 12b excels at natural languages but terrible at long context. Pixtral 12b is better at long context (not stellar), but worse at natural language.
• FooBarWidget 1y ago
  Sovereignty. Having a European company means others can't as easily take it away. This is one thing the EU can learn from China. Lots of "expert" smash China for duplicating/"copying" stuff that the west was already doing, better. They criticize that it's wasteful spending etc. They don't get it. It's about sovereignty, so you're not at the whims of whomever wants to sanction you for whatever frivolous reasons. The EU is now learning what it means when it can't rely on the US for everything anymore. It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as the competition right now. Human capital takes time and effort to cultivate. There is strategic reason to keep Mistal alive even if it's not very commercially competitive. I hope our EU leaders can see this too, commit for the long term, and don't just look at financial balance sheets.
  • jansenmac 1y ago
    Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier. Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
    • anarticle 1y ago
      Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.
      • FooBarWidget 1y ago
        Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive. But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share. The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit. I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
• anonymousDan 1y ago
  That's a massive USP.
  • rgreekguy 1y ago
    Indeed, if they weren't using non-European infrastructure.
    • pegasus 1y ago
      It's non-ideal, true, but still very valuable. Given the possible potential of GenAI, having a locally-developed model is of strategic importance, no question about it. There are efforts for building independent cloud infrastructure as well, and anyway these two efforts are mostly orthogonal.
• mosselman 1y ago
  This would be great for us! We are building an AI agent tool and the biggest questions we get from potential customers are about the privacy issue of using non-EU providers. So having an actually good EU model would be perfect for us.
  • fastball 1y ago
    Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models. Their competition is mostly from OSS models, which 1. can actually be run anywhere and 2. frequently outperform Mistral models anyway (e.g. DeepSeek 3, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 all outperform Mistral in current LMArena rankings[1]). Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. If the proposition is "support EU businesses", then ok, but that is a different thing. [1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • cloudify 1y ago
      Due to the Cloud Act, hosting "In the EU through a US company" and "In the EU through an EU company" are two very different things.
      • fastball 1y ago
        Sure, but that's why I mentioned all the open models which are better than Mistral and you can run where and however you want.
    • BoredPositron 1y ago
      At the risk of being contrarian, investment decisions are rarely driven by publicly available product offerings alone.
    • pimterry 1y ago
      > Hell, you can host actual frontier models (e.g. Claude 4) on AWS Bedrock in the EU, so "in the EU" (from a hosting perspective) cannot be Mistral's USP. I've seen zero cases so far where "physically present & managed in the EU but still owned by a US company" is sufficient to mitigate the typical US hosting concerns. The threat is that AWS could be forced to a) suddenly pull services or b) spy on data by the US administration. That the DC is located entirely in the EU does nothing to reduce that risk if it's still fully owned by Amazon. The was already a major concern for the last couple of years given the successful legal challenges against the privacy shield as sufficient data protection to give personal data to US organizations, and is way more of a concern after issues like Karin Khan and the ICC being suddenly cut off by Microsoft - it's clear that US companies literally can & will suddenly block key business services on administration whims. There's plenty of organizations where that's unacceptable risk.
• abdellah123 1y ago
  good luck with hosting, inferencing at scale ! Mistral provides support !
• epolanski 1y ago
  1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"? 2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral. 3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving. 4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.
  • BoorishBears 1y ago
    I think catering to people who won't use the best version of an emerging tech is a losing strategy, but I guess we'll see.
    • epolanski 1y ago
      No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best". It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster". Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them. For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless. That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.
      • BoorishBears 1y ago
        Pretty far off the mark. I've spent the last year building an AI product in a situation with really cut throat margins: I've post-trained every model Mistral has released in that time frame that was either open-weights or supported fine-tuning via Le Platforme (so I've gotten them at their absolute best case) Mistral's models are not competitive anymore, and haven't been for most of that time. Gemma 27b has better world knowledge, Deepseek obsoleted their dense models, Gemini Flash is faster and their models are not even close to cost competitive with it (shocking claim otherwise tbh). Mistral's platform is not fast (Mistral Medium is slower than Sonnet 4, which is just straight up insane!). Cerebras is fast, but there are both competitors offering similar speeds (Samba Nova and Groq), and other models that are faster on Cerebras (people really sleep on gpt-oss after the launch jitters) You're inventing a snowman with your analogy: their models are just irrelevant, and that's informed by using everything from dots.llm to Minimax-Text to Jamba (which is really underestimated btw, and not Chinese if sinophobia has a grip on your org) to Seed-OSS, in production. tl;dr: the only way to justify Mistral's models is in fact to reject the best solutions in any dimension that can be described as model performance. If you're still using them and it really isn't for non-performance reasons, I assume you're overindexing on benchmarks or behind on the last year or so of open-weight progress and would recommend actually trying some other offerings.
• benterix 1y ago
  What recent history showed us is that neither of LLM providers is unique, people switch models easily, nobody cares about the name but about the optimal performance for a given task (which can vary a lot between use cases). (For example, Mistral is my go to platform for quick answers, not necessarily precise or long. In the past, I'd use GPT 4o for this (slower than mistral but not that much), but once sama decided to mud the waters and put everything under one umbrella it makes no sense for that purpose.)
• mahrain 1y ago
  ASML is not an american tech company known to throw billions around. It appears they do see the value of LLM-based AI but are not comfortable working with either US or China based suppliers. Also, don't disregard that their new CEO is French...
• advael 1y ago
  I mean, even if that's true, being based in the EU might matter a lot given how keen that bloc is on becoming more technologically sovereign from America and China right now
• chvid 1y ago
  France has some of the best computer scientists in the world. Cheap energy. Rule of law and is overall an extremely desirable place to live.
  • 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    NYT: "Why France’s Financial Woes Are Pushing Its Government to the Brink" https://archive.is/oXDiI https://archive.is/oXDiI I understand Marine Le Pen and friends are on track to win the presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_French_presidential_election#Second_round https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
• midasz 1y ago
  Being based in Europa is a massive USP for European companies - the USA being harder and harder to trust each day. It's difficult to build business on shaky ground.
• microtonal 1y ago
  Mistral being in the EU is a feature. A lot of European companies/organizations are hesitant to use US/Chinese LLMs because of privacy reasons. For instance, the university my wife is working at are evaluating using Mistral as their default (and only reimbursed) LLM. One or two years ago, an US solution would be completely acceptable (with promises to comply with the GDPR). But a lot of damage has been done the last 9 months or so.
• tensor 1y ago
  Every. Single. Time. a Mistral story hits the front page, a variation of this exact comment is posted. And every single time it is corrected. It almost feels like intentional misinformation. To repeat for the millionth time unique offerings for Mistral: - some of the best edge models. - some of the most cost effective in terms of cost per performance medium size models. - unique small language models. - unique OCR offering. And also, being based in the EU is a HUGE advantage for any non-US company. The only thing predictable about doing business is that it's not predictable. At any moment you could get a shakedown, or just be cut off from US technology. It's a huge business risk.
  • greyb 1y ago
    I don't feel that your comment has corrected anything. I like their OCR offering but it is suited for certain use cases, and would be overkill for many industry use cases. Mistral Saba is cool but there's no evidence uptake has been significant within the Global South compared to Chinese open weight models. Mistral Medium performs worse and costs double what gpt-oss-120B offers.