9 ms·
Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'
- DivingForGold 5mo agoTypical EU response. Seems Europeans have stumbled to 2nd or 3rd place in the A I race, if even that.
- imperfectibex 5mo ago2nd would be China imho...so 3rd at best
- pesacharia 5mo agoIf you include the UK and Switzerland in Europe then Europe is clearly doing ahead of China. The 1st and 3rd AI nations in Europe are not in the EU though, so if you restrict it to just the EU it falls well behind china
- dumbmrblah 5mo agoWhat does UK and Switzerland have that even remotely compares to what China has in terms of AI?
- jvwww 5mo agoLondon has incredible AI talent but yeah, unfortunately most of them work on American tech. In another life Deepmind would not be owned by Google but alas.
- throwa356262 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind
- xyzsparetimexyz 5mo agoThats American
- verzali 5mo agoFounded in London, headquartered in London, and with a British CEO.
- barbacoa 5mo agoAmerica innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.
- amunozo 5mo agoAlways the same ridiculous statement.
- poszlem 5mo agoI, too, cannot wait when it finally stops being true, so people can stop saying it.
- janice1999 5mo agoAmericans are just as regulated and with even more egregious regulatory capture (see the American broadband/mobile provider cartel). At least Europeans get a little consumer protection.
- polski-g 5mo agoYou need a doctor's note to buy contact lens solution in Holland. The level of regulation isn't close.
- nchagnet 5mo agoThat's just... false? You just go to Etos or Kruidvat for that.
- sottol 5mo agoOtoh, you can buy contact lenses OTC in other European countries... not saying Europe isn't over-regulated (try legally building a bike-trail on your own forest-land in Germany!! ...insanity) but it's a bad example.
- amunozo 5mo agoYou cannot build mixed used buildings in most of due to ridiculous housing zoning, can you?
- mhitza 5mo ago[dead]
- amazingamazing 5mo agoDeepseek is open source. Whats stopping them from distilling it and releasing their own model today? Where is the reliance on America? Gpus?
- mvanbaak 5mo agothe problem is not the model, but the infrastructure needed to run the model. so yeah, gpus, cpus, network, etc etc
- polski-g 5mo agoPower is 2-3x as expensive in Europe than American. They're toast.
- adev_ 5mo ago> Power is 2-3x as expensive in Europe than American. They're toast. Europe is not Germany. Electricity price is 2-3x times more expensive in Germany. Electricity price for electricity intensive professional is around 12-14cts/kWh in France and can be reduce under 10cts/kWh for big consummers. Which is competitive with the cost in several US states (it is still higher than Texas but not 3x). Nordic countries should be able to align on that too.
- nperson 5mo agoElectricity price in Germany for industries was ~16,7ct/kWh in 2026, special ones pay 11-12ct today and will pay a capped 5ct soon.
- adev_ 5mo ago> will pay a capped 5ct soon. Make sense. Production price in Europe is between 3.5-4.5cts/kwh averaged. The rest are mainly transport and taxes. If the EU currently choose to exonerate industrial consummers from these taxes and offload them on citizen (which honestly make sense from a business perspective), they could currently beat most US states in term of pricing while providing lower carbon footprint/kWh
- SilverElfin 5mo agoUnfortunately Europe is already far behind. OpenAI started over a decade ago. How can Europe catch up? Maybe if progress slows down and they have time to at least get into the same position as Chinese models, but they also need to invest in it. But with what money? And why would talented people stay there instead of going to America where they can get a fairer share of their hard earned money? There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.
- polotics 5mo agoThe most telling part is when he explains that in order to grant stock options he had to navigate each and every single different legal setup for each one of the member states. I felt for a while the "European Union" has been turned into a foil for nations that had absolutely no intention to really integrate. Unless actual integration, simple one rule for all on the continent, happens within the next handfuls of months, then this ship's going down and I organize to exit stage left, Trump ain't Xi.
- Etheryte 5mo agoI don't think this argument holds much water. Each state in the US has their own legislation and taxes and it works just fine.
- trinix912 5mo agoEach EU member state has their own stock market and you often can't trade the stocks from one country through the stock exchange in another. This means that if you want to offer EU-wide stock options, you either have to convince everyone to fly to your country and register at your country's stock exchange (which few will bother doing), or go through the process of filing and managing stocks of your company at 20+ different stock exchanges. It's one of the things that have been recently brought up again in the EU parliament, but getting everyone to agree on a common stock market is not going to be easy.
- orochimaaru 5mo ago>>>> In a world where you import all your digital services from the United States, you have no leverage over the United States It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.
- bruki 5mo agoComparing AI to resources it highly depends on is a bit far fetched.
- Insanity 5mo agoOnly somewhat. I’d argue the internet could be considered a basic utility to function in the modern world, yet that just builds on electricity.
- thfuran 5mo agoThose are all mutually dependent. Turn off the electric grid and close all the roads and see how long municipal water supplies last.
- Kye 5mo agoWhat resource isn't interdependent with at least one other resource?
- throaway198234 5mo ago
- Oras 5mo ago> and a challenger to OpenAI Big claim. Apart from Mistral OCR, I didn't find any of their models remotely useful. They do have a chance to become sole AI provider for France as French are trying to break from US tech, not because their product is useful. Sounds like a cry to raise more money, which is inline with their initial pitch [0] [0] https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral
- jstummbillig 5mo agoIt seems fairly plausible that they will become useful. I would not consider coding requiring vastly better AI models than the best we have today. The more interesting question is what advantages excess intelligence provides in the future more generally (warfare, system management, etc)
- Oras 5mo ago> fairly plausible Based on what? is that a feeling or based on evidence?
- jstummbillig 5mo agoThe trajectory all models are taking, while software development requirements continue to stay fairly level – at least I don't see why they wouldn't. We will still mostly need reliable, boring software. I don't see why Mistral would stop getting better. It will, just more slowly. Eventually it will be good enough, and continue to be good enough.
- olejorgenb 5mo agoTheir transcription (STT) models are good IMO
- sometimelurker 5mo ago> ... didn't find any of their models remotely useful. I daily drive Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning, getting a nice 70 tok/s on my GPU. its actually much faster than Google/DDG searches and I use it a ton when coding to check methods and remember ways to implement things. Its better than the qwen stuff of the same size because its not filled with ccp bs.
- JohnBrookz 5mo agoOnly mistral could re rerelease deepseeks model and do a worse job.
- xyzsparetimexyz 5mo agoEurope is never going to have sovereignty in a lot of areas. A vassal of the US or a vassal of China. Pick your poison.
- awestroke 5mo agoIf it ever comes to that, we'll pick China, thanks
- ejoso 5mo agoSo you’d enjoy being like the free and happy people of Tibet then, eh?
- awestroke 5mo agoLesser of two evils etc. How about south america as a counterexample?
- ejoso 5mo agoIs it lesser? Up until the 2010s the US was generally pretty good with EU & EU adjacent. It’s likely to return too, as there remains a strong societal will for it. I ask this - which has the more persistent track record of a free or more free society? I think recency bias and online discourse has polluted perceptions.
- verzali 5mo agoAs opposed to the free and happy native Americans? Oh wait, they were all murdered and their culture destroyed.
- bryanrasmussen 5mo agoright it totally makes sense because it's the third biggest economy in the world, it has to be a vassal of number one or number two, because there has been a situation where number three in anything tries to move up, if you're third in line you must submit.
- boomskats 5mo agoIf we could just do something, anything about being so aggressively colonised by the Palantirs and the neoliberal think tanks and the Christian far-right money, and ISDS-littered trade agreements, then the rest would just follow. Sadly though, I don't think we stand a chance.
- Insanity 5mo agoAs a European I want mistral and EU to do well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t actually give up my well paid engineering job outside of EU to even entertain working for them in EU. Too low salaries and too high taxes.
- scirob 5mo agoI wonder why googles biggest European office is in the low tax high salary country of Switzerland
- basicoperation 5mo agoZurich is third behind Dublin (definitely for tax reasons) and London.
- hobofan 5mo agoThat's the biggest engineering office, but not the biggest overall European Google office, right? That would be in low tax low salary Ireland.
- disgruntledphd2 5mo ago> low tax low salary Ireland. Ireland is neither of those, fwiw. I get pretty decent money here, and pay a marginal rate of 52% on everything over 80k.
- jstummbillig 5mo agoHow do you divorce being a European principally from being willing to pay taxes? What part of being uniquely European do you value that does not fundamentally require taxes?
- trinix912 5mo agoSo just because someone is born in Europe they should automatically believe that the taxation system is flawless and salaries sufficient?
- mrtksn 5mo agoThe only thing that can “save Europe” is US embargo, otherwise doesn’t make sense to do replication of the US effort whatsoever. In US the AI is a private effort, in Europe there are no businesses that are interested in investing such large amounts of money when they can benefit from US made AI. In China they don’t have this option to use the US offerings so they must invest, be it the government or the business that will be protected from US competition. Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money. It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo agoThe hilarious irony is that Trump has been yelling at Europe since ~2017 to stop being so reliant on the US for everything, to pay more for its own defense, stop regulating and start innovating, etc. Basically everything that's in the Draghi report. Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats' heads appear to remain firmly buried in the sand.
- mrtksn 5mo agoEU isn’t governed by the china communist party, the only way to stop being reliant to US is to stop trade with US and the cost of it will be enormous. Trump needs to create such a high political risk that the economic damage be justified. He definitely did a lot to help, but the damage needs to be irreparable so that business can feel safe from US competition. He needs to do do something so outrageous that Germany would not mind losing the US car market for example.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo agoI think one could argue that he tried this "the easy way" in his first term. He vented against Nord Stream with NATO, he vented against the regulations and the energy dependence and closing the nuke reactors. But he didn't actually do anything about it. The difference now is that he's turning the screws and putting the pressure on. Call this "the hard way". I can understand why EU leaders do not like this one bit. But also, they had their chance...
- InTheArena 5mo agoBig tech bro CEO Stokes nationalistic fears to justify corporate handouts for his company. Europe is more like America every day.
- DiabloD3 5mo agoThis is mostly a performance by the Mistral CEO. He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has. LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard. All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely. Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.
- oytis 5mo ago> they cannot help you find security exploits. What is the reason for the recent deluge of CVEs with working exploits to open source projects then?
- DiabloD3 5mo agoAnthropic repeatedly refuses to show their work. Is this just a clever application of the harness, so its not inherently LLM at all? Did Anthropic figure out how to take the next step that changes my mind on LLMs? Is this actually just Anthropic committing an interesting case of fraud and using some human labor intensive loop with LLMs? Is this not LLM inference at all, and they're just using only the perplexity measurement on the input code to accelerate where human eyeballs look? Anthropic refuses to release their model under an accepted open weights license, and that isn't a good sign.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cat_plus_plus 5mo agoYou just need to work on your agent design and prompting skills, modern LLMs are crazy good at all the things you listed with the right context and tools.
- cat_plus_plus 5mo agoChina's AI vassal state. But so far in a good way because it's open source and everyone benefits.
- moomoo11 5mo agoi always forget EU exists when it comes to tech they’re so hostile to it (lawfare) and have seemingly little innovation comparatively why is that?
- ralph84 5mo agoEvery time you have to dismiss a cookie banner, thank a European.
- trinix912 5mo agoBecause most people in the EU outside of the tech field care more about the welfare policies and overall quality of life than some ambitious tech projects of a few random private companies, from which they're unlikely to directly benefit from, especially when those are located outside of their member state.
- logicchains 5mo agoOverall quality of life goes down if you just keep cutting up the pie without growing it, especially when you go into debt to buy more pie. The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents; Europeans' disdain for economic growth is already catching up with them.
- throaway198234 5mo agoThat's the same in the USA! lol
- trinix912 5mo ago> The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents This just isn’t the case in my country and most of Central/Eastern Europe at all. I’m under 30, when my parents were my age, this country had just started recovering from communism. Besides, there’s more to economy than just AI. If anything, I’d rather see my tax money invested into multiple different fields than having it gambled on a single hyped tech field that might as well turn out to not be so easily profitable or world changing in the end.
- vasco 5mo agoBecoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under? It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.
- TrackerFF 5mo agoI do believe that due to security concerns, European countries at the state level will try to detach themselves from relying on US infrastructure. Not only AI, but all critical things. For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where: A) They'd become enemies. B) They could just turn off access. One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.
- sajithdilshan 5mo agoThe important key word in your comment is "will try", they will try, but fail miserably. They have built a wall of bureaucracy to keep them prisoners and even trying to change an infrastructure provider would need cutting 100 red tapes and 5 years. Not to mention, even if they want to switch, that's huge capital investment and that's not something EU can afford given the social economical state they are at the moment.
- kingleopold 5mo agothey already lost it but I guess it takes time to acknowledge it? Europe does not have capital or structures to catch up, it can't change in 2 years
- vk5tu 5mo agoConsider that Boeing once had no European rival. Europe is bulding consensus on what technology sovereignty means. This is a self-interested statement within that discussion. At some point the EU will appoint at rapporteur to synthesise those viewports into a formal definition. The EC will use that to develop a programme of works which is satisfactory to the member states and other interested states. The US is often lulled by the seemingly endless discursive nature of pan-European projects to think that they are not serious or effective. And then one day there is an Ariane or Airbus or Galileo.
- kingleopold 5mo agoat those time Europe was growing a lot more in real terms and had one of best engineering in the world. Maybe the best cars with mech. engineering was already made at those times, only Japan was rival for cars. No way Europe now have near best AI engineers and teams, huge difference.
- trilogic 5mo agoA quick search of revenue of google and facebook (in billions) 2015-2020. Is that so hard to understand that there is an entire economy wrapped around AI/IOT? Didn´t Europe learn anything from historic data? Google Facebook 2015 $67.80B* $17.93B Google segment revenue (Alphabet restructuring). Total Alphabet: $74.98B 2016 $81.30B $25.76B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $89.55B 2017 $100.10B $40.65B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $109.46B 2018 $128.90B $55.84B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $136.82B 2019 $143.90B $70.70B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $161.86B 2020 $152.70B $85.97B *Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $182.53B Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89 2016 16.88 2017 17.88 2018 18.89 2019 19.31 2020 17.42 Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp. What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?
- raincole 5mo agoIn other words, "EU governments please give me money." Not saying that American companies are better in this regard, but if we interpret each CEO's words with the same scrutiny as how we view Elon or Altman's words... that's pretty much it.
- radicalbyte 5mo agoI'd like to regulate them the way American companies are regulated, and then regulate American companies in Europe the way European companies are regulated. Level the playing field. Not exactly rocket science, it's just copying the things the Americans (and Chinese) are already doing.
- sajithdilshan 5mo agoI think he's asking to cut red tapes than money. EU was the first to regulate AI even without any company in EU producing a frontier model.
- radicalbyte 5mo agoI've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.
- sajithdilshan 5mo agoRenewable energy is unreliable without a steady storage capacity and EU would still rely on raw materials for battery production on other countries. Further, regardless of the energy source, what is vital for AI or any other industry is a steady, reliable power source which cannot be provided only through renewables in EU, not only because lack of storage, but also unfavourable geography.
- radicalbyte 5mo agoThat's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it. We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.
- sajithdilshan 5mo agoThat is not true. Germany shutting down their atomic power plants had a rippling effect on the energy market in whole EU because they thought renewables would be enough to power the German industries. It was criticised by even the Sweden's Minister for Energy (Ebba Busch). Right now Germany is being de-industrialised because it's far expensive for the industries to produce goods there compared to other EU countries and those companies are moving out. That's the price Germany is paying right now for betting on renewables without any investment on infrastructure or a proper migration plan and blind political guidance. Even the EU has rare earth minerals, do you really thing the climate activists, nature conservation activists and all other far lefties would actually allow mining those minerals in EU?
- enaaem 5mo agoI am sceptical of the AI world dominance race. The thing is that AI is not winner takes all market. AI models and server space is all fungible. It is very valuable, but no one will hold exclusive AI capabilities in the long run.
- georgeburdell 5mo agoAgreed. I’ve switched to local models for many of my simpler workloads because they’re good enough. Coding is still through a frontier model though
- spwa4 5mo agoIn the HPC space, it has always been a "winner takes all" market. 90% or more of the business goes to the biggest provider with few exceptions (in terms of dollars, obviously all compute gets used). And, yeah, quite a bit of that is government having ... suboptimal ... developers who want to run bad code that nobody's allowed to look at. And yes, it is about weapons design, which is why nobody is allowed to look at (and certainly not fix) the code. I think the idea is that AI will dominate a bunch of industries, from government administration, to intelligence (arguably they have that one already), to software, to insurance, to entertainment (produce 10 new lord of the rings series per day). And the first one to get there will "own" Government administrations, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, ... If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the first one to have a great popular success wins. Not in one market, on ALL of them.
- enaaem 5mo agoVery few governments outside of the US will let a US company "own" them. It is a national security issue. They just take a good enough locally made model.
- spwa4 5mo agoThe UK will Poland will NATO will > They just take a good enough locally made model. You're right that the question if that is an expensive mistake or not ... is for now an open question. However, even if Europe starts using it's own models, they'll be running on US chips.
- alecco 5mo agoThe EU created a € 94 billion fund for exactly this a couple of years ago. And then they put in charge a lawyer who is the daughter of a powerful Spanish media mogul. I tried registering a couple of years ago, but it required a female co-founder, N employees in the EU, and a laundry list of ridiculous demands unrelated to technology or real startups. And even the paperwork to start a company in the EU is a PITA. You have to incorporate in Bulgaria or something if you want anything in reasonable times. And good luck with Social Security and tax agencies. Forget it.
- duxup 5mo agoThey just buckled on tariffs right? Politically they seem willing…
- sometimelurker 5mo agoEurope can totally do this. this is a race about talent, not vram, and Europe has asml + universities; both. if they want to compete they can. deepseek v1 was "built in a cave with a box of scraps". now that they have actual hardware v4 is huge, but what really matters is talent.
- pu_pe 5mo agoMistral's claim to European sovereignty is somewhat weak, because: - They are partially owned by American companies - They run their infra on American providers (AWS especially) - Their models are a distillation and therefore dependent of American and Chinese models