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> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle

by simonw 5mo ago

> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers. Mistral leaning into on-prem and European-hosted models is very smart.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
johnbarron 5mo ago
Lets hope the models can do a better KYC than the humans have been doing..because they are well known. Or is this a case of the humans, now preparing for the excuse it was the AI failure? "BNP Paribas Sentenced for Conspiring to Violate the Trading with the Enemy Act" - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentenced-conspiring-violate-international-emergency-economic-powers-act-and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentence... "BNP Paribas caught up in French money laundering investigation" - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-up-french-money-laundering-investigation-le-monde-2023-12-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-... "BNP Paribas faces $246m fine in currency scandal" - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 "BNP Paribas caught in a Cypriot money laundering investigation" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/bnp-paribas-caught-in-a-cypriot-money-laundering-investigation_6376471_8.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/b... In Money Laundering their track record is unmatched: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...
- pavlov 5mo ago
  When the humans have a track record of corruption, it might make sense for a company to seek parallel opinions from a LLM so they can at least flag suspicious human decisions. Assuming BNP Paribas leadership wants to stop the corruption of course.
  - johnbarron 5mo ago
    They had years to fix it: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...
bg24 5mo ago
Also Mistral did just the right thing by acquiring Koyeb, to beef up their deployment at scale expertise.
psychoslave 5mo ago
That's just one side of the story, not following it on details, but their own le chat explained to me that the company was a capitalist succubus starving to build data center in some north European country. Hilarious if you ask me.
doctorpangloss 5mo ago
Yeah but why use mistral on premises instead of Qwen?
- simonw 5mo ago
  One reason might be that Mistral doesn't have a risk of weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    >weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. Just ask the Chinese what they think about LGBTQ+, Japanese, pride parades, Islam and colored minorities. Every nation has its own biases injected in its domestic LLMs at this point. Otherwise they risk getting in trouble for hate speech/disinformation in the jurisdiction where they operate. Same how Google Maps cleverly biases the lines of disputed borders based on where you are viewing it from. Or how Google maps switched 'Gulf of Mexico' to 'Gulf of America' in an instant when the orange man signed the paper. Google won't want to anger the US administration the same way how Mistral won't want to anger France and the EU, so Mistral will have all the EU prime directives injected into its LLMs no matter if they're ludicrous or not. The law is the law whether you agree with it or not. Companies want to survive and will pander to whatever the whims the regime they live under are at the current moment regardless of what is right or wrong. But if I'm using a LLM for personal projects or generating a photorealistic choreographed fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, I don't care what its political biases are, I care if it solves my problem better and cheaper than the competition, and here the Chinese models could end up winning the consumer market, which is why you see Mistral and other EU alternatives focusing exclusive on B-2-B corporate market.
    - simonw 5mo ago
      > What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. I agree. That's why I think European companies might prefer a European model.
throw14082020 5mo ago
Respectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead. Who else will buy their AI? and what other options do they have?
- port11 5mo ago
  You don’t think it’s smart to get reliable funding this way? From Banking the Cash Cow? Devstral is getting better, it’s the Vibe harness that’s holding it back (I think). I can see how that would drive some business as well. Their chat thingie isn’t very well positioned, but gets results. Could be an euro or two per month, maybe bundled with some more features. It’s not like Mistral has no options, if anything they’re just a bit complacent and not ambitious with their plans.
- lucaspiller 5mo ago
  There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
neonstatic 5mo ago
It may be very smart for them, but it also shows that the EU has no desire, therefore no chance, to change and lead anything. The only thing it has is regulation.
- oblio 5mo ago
  The EU has just poured unfathomable amounts of money into continent wide infrastructure (https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resilience-facility-1_en https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resili...) - due to COVID, the military - due to Russia, etc. They can't do everything.
ElFitz 5mo ago
Isn’t that the usual EU startup playbook once they give up on the B2C or world-scale SaaS markets? Refocusing on large (European) enterprise B2B and government contracts? It always felt to me this (enterprise B2B) was where European startups went to die.
sbinnee 5mo ago
My take is that Mistral is not focusing on generating contents such as code, images, or videos. They focus on multi-lingual models, OCR, voice, and others I believe. Their model intro page manifests that although it always confuses me because it's too colorful and there are too many categories, not to mention model names. I hope their decisions will pay off.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  From what I understood they are retiring a lot of the specialised models in favour of the main family.

by simonw 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

johnbarron 5mo ago

Lets hope the models can do a better KYC than the humans have been doing..because they are well known. Or is this a case of the humans, now preparing for the excuse it was the AI failure? "BNP Paribas Sentenced for Conspiring to Violate the Trading with the Enemy Act" - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentenced-conspiring-violate-international-emergency-economic-powers-act-and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentence... "BNP Paribas caught up in French money laundering investigation" - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-up-french-money-laundering-investigation-le-monde-2023-12-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-... "BNP Paribas faces $246m fine in currency scandal" - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 "BNP Paribas caught in a Cypriot money laundering investigation" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/bnp-paribas-caught-in-a-cypriot-money-laundering-investigation_6376471_8.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/b... In Money Laundering their track record is unmatched: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...

pavlov 5mo ago
When the humans have a track record of corruption, it might make sense for a company to seek parallel opinions from a LLM so they can at least flag suspicious human decisions. Assuming BNP Paribas leadership wants to stop the corruption of course.
- johnbarron 5mo ago
  They had years to fix it: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...

bg24 5mo ago

Also Mistral did just the right thing by acquiring Koyeb, to beef up their deployment at scale expertise.

psychoslave 5mo ago

That's just one side of the story, not following it on details, but their own le chat explained to me that the company was a capitalist succubus starving to build data center in some north European country. Hilarious if you ask me.

doctorpangloss 5mo ago

Yeah but why use mistral on premises instead of Qwen?

simonw 5mo ago
One reason might be that Mistral doesn't have a risk of weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  >weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. Just ask the Chinese what they think about LGBTQ+, Japanese, pride parades, Islam and colored minorities. Every nation has its own biases injected in its domestic LLMs at this point. Otherwise they risk getting in trouble for hate speech/disinformation in the jurisdiction where they operate. Same how Google Maps cleverly biases the lines of disputed borders based on where you are viewing it from. Or how Google maps switched 'Gulf of Mexico' to 'Gulf of America' in an instant when the orange man signed the paper. Google won't want to anger the US administration the same way how Mistral won't want to anger France and the EU, so Mistral will have all the EU prime directives injected into its LLMs no matter if they're ludicrous or not. The law is the law whether you agree with it or not. Companies want to survive and will pander to whatever the whims the regime they live under are at the current moment regardless of what is right or wrong. But if I'm using a LLM for personal projects or generating a photorealistic choreographed fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, I don't care what its political biases are, I care if it solves my problem better and cheaper than the competition, and here the Chinese models could end up winning the consumer market, which is why you see Mistral and other EU alternatives focusing exclusive on B-2-B corporate market.
  - simonw 5mo ago
    > What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. I agree. That's why I think European companies might prefer a European model.

throw14082020 5mo ago

Respectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead. Who else will buy their AI? and what other options do they have?

port11 5mo ago
You don’t think it’s smart to get reliable funding this way? From Banking the Cash Cow? Devstral is getting better, it’s the Vibe harness that’s holding it back (I think). I can see how that would drive some business as well. Their chat thingie isn’t very well positioned, but gets results. Could be an euro or two per month, maybe bundled with some more features. It’s not like Mistral has no options, if anything they’re just a bit complacent and not ambitious with their plans.
lucaspiller 5mo ago
There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

neonstatic 5mo ago

It may be very smart for them, but it also shows that the EU has no desire, therefore no chance, to change and lead anything. The only thing it has is regulation.

oblio 5mo ago
The EU has just poured unfathomable amounts of money into continent wide infrastructure (https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resilience-facility-1_en https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resili...) - due to COVID, the military - due to Russia, etc. They can't do everything.

ElFitz 5mo ago

Isn’t that the usual EU startup playbook once they give up on the B2C or world-scale SaaS markets? Refocusing on large (European) enterprise B2B and government contracts? It always felt to me this (enterprise B2B) was where European startups went to die.

sbinnee 5mo ago

My take is that Mistral is not focusing on generating contents such as code, images, or videos. They focus on multi-lingual models, OCR, voice, and others I believe. Their model intro page manifests that although it always confuses me because it's too colorful and there are too many categories, not to mention model names. I hope their decisions will pay off.

kergonath 5mo ago
From what I understood they are retiring a lot of the specialised models in favour of the main family.