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Mistral raises €3B

850 points by kuberwastaken 25d ago

sznio 25d ago
> Existing investors a16z I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in
- 0x20cowboy 25d ago
  Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
  - hallgrim 25d ago
    If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
    - shrubby 25d ago
      https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_for_american_democracy_w_gil_duran https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_fo... Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
    - ghurtado 25d ago
      Ok, so once again South Park sounds completely deranged when they let reality do the writing. I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.
    - vlyan 25d ago
      to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing. Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.
      - vintagedave 25d ago
        Other than investment, such as this news? I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
      - wongarsu 25d ago
        Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation. But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
        pembrook 25d ago
        On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable. It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.
      - __alexs 25d ago
        Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo. Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them. I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
    - Hikikomori 25d ago
      Their brains were broken because the government still has the ability to say no to them in some cases.
    - BoredomIsFun 25d ago
      > seen as the inhibitors of progress I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress. What a load of delusion.
  - bayarearefugee 25d ago
    [flagged]
    - speedgoose 25d ago
      I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?
      - ReptileMan 25d ago
        He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
        phtrivier 25d ago
        The whole "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” also hints at _something_. But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea. (Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")
        andsoitis 25d ago
        > He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds. He also expelled demons from a man and conceded to their request to be installed in 2,000 pigs. That led to them drowning, causing substantial destruction of somebody else’s property for no obvious practical necessity. The local people become frightened and ask Jesus to leave their region.
      - graemep 25d ago
        Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely. Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.
      - bayarearefugee 25d ago
  - luplex 25d ago
    No, Thiel is talking about the UN and global minimum taxes when he talks about the Antichrist.
- Frieren 25d ago
  This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly. Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
  - shrubby 25d ago
    The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger. Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power. This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
    - maxrev17 25d ago
      Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!
      - skeledrew 25d ago
        It's default behavior due to scarcity. Remove that permanently and there's no longer incentive to be greedy.
    - Frieren 25d ago
      > Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
      - shrubby 25d ago
        Yup. I tried to say that conventional taxation is not enough. As the power is hidden in Panama bank accounts we need to figure out means beyond taxation to neutralize it as it being used to obliterate the future.
0x20cowboy 25d ago
Très bien! C’est parti!
steinvakt2 25d ago
That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
- danmaz74 25d ago
  At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
- hobofan 25d ago
  Are they, though? I would say, let's find out when the IPO settles, but then again the market also sustains a incredibly crazy valuation for Tesla.
  - steinvakt2 25d ago
    If not, I’m buying stocks
    - nicce 25d ago
      Better to buy GPUs and RAM with current rate
- shikck200 25d ago
  Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month. The bubble is going to burst soon.
  - skeledrew 25d ago
    I think the Pro and other subs allow them to save big on ads (Claude Code use is required and it pushes their ads) and allow easy access to free data (CC occasionally solicits feedback and session sharing, which I'm pretty sure some users oblige). Also CC does massive prompt caching tailored to work in lockstep with their platform. With all that and who knows what else, I'd say it balances over time.
keel-control 25d ago
I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.
- ludvigk 25d ago
  Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?) In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
  - cbg0 25d ago
    Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 25d ago
    OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
    - clarionbell 25d ago
      If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well. Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking. Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue. What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow. And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.
ajjahs 25d ago
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v3ss0n 25d ago
No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
- w4yai 25d ago
  I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.
  - smurf9852 25d ago
    You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.
    - disgruntledphd2 25d ago
      > Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding. But they're not competing (offically at least) for GPUs and they have much, much cheaper electricity (which makes pre-training more affordable).
- mosselman 25d ago
  They've started hosting GLM-5.2, that should be very telling of their capabilities at the moment. Hopefully the investment will allow them to hire the right people to become competitive.
- Raed667 25d ago
  can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
  - chronic7304 25d ago
    > can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds? Culture. In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture. Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.
lain98 25d ago
I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(
- elvennn 25d ago
  I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them. Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.
  - selestify 25d ago
    Care to share any more?
- tasoeur 25d ago
  I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).
- colesantiago 25d ago
  Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral? Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw) Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
  - rytsEa 25d ago
    I am sure plenty of people had the same thought.
    - colesantiago 25d ago
      Not many can execute, but people are welcome to try if you can get customers. Better than throwing CVs everywhere with no response for years.
Morkeeth 25d ago
Europes last chance
- throwa356262 25d ago
  I don't know. The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
  - alansaber 25d ago
    Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?
  - aurareturn 25d ago
    I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS. That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
    - throwa356262 25d ago
      My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.
      - aurareturn 25d ago
        Impressive doesn't mean sustainable. We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral. I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.
        25d ago
CerebralCoding 25d ago
Too bad Mistral fucking sucks
donmb 25d ago
Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.
- HenrikPontoppid 25d ago
  When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself. Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.
  - Slartie 25d ago
    Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait... > so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.
    - HenrikPontoppid 25d ago
      The value of these companies is not defined entirely by the state of their current models. A much more important signal is their chance of having the best model in the future. Just like with anything having to do with investment, this is the castle in the sky. Also, shame on me for simplifying things so much - but I still believe in my original sentiment.
davedx 25d ago
Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
- dwedge 25d ago
  They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
  - intended 25d ago
    It bears repeating - all markets get regulated. Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers. But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious. To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.
    - 21asdffdsa12 25d ago
      And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
      - nickpp 25d ago
        Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore. I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
        25d ago
cl-coder 25d ago
So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?
AidenVennis 25d ago
I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be enough to be used by a lot of companies and governments in the EU that are (trying to) move away from US tech.
- Traubenfuchs 25d ago
  > but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.
shevy-java 25d ago
They are all responsible for driving up RAM prices. I want my money back.
ph4rsikal 25d ago
Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.
- BenoitP 25d ago
  And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's. Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.
  - eloisant 25d ago
    Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.
  - dist-epoch 25d ago
    if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one
- antupis 25d ago
  Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.
- alansaber 25d ago
  The question is not, will mistral be able to create the best models (seems bloody unlikely). The question is, will mistral have enough expertise to dominate its business use-case, which is the model infra/deployment market within the EU (which is more plausible, with even a 3rd, 4th, 5th best model development team).
- tensor 25d ago
  The big US labs are naively hoping that compute power will always be their moat. I strongly suspect they are dead wrong, and newer architectures will require vastly less training data and outperform the brute force approach of US labs.
nalekberov 25d ago
"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.
- philipwhiuk 25d ago
  The US invested billions to ensure sovereign launch capability. Seems to have paid off.
tasoeur 25d ago
Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/
- kome 25d ago
  some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
  - tasoeur 25d ago
    I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.
    - Towaway69 25d ago
      > researchers may be looking for greener pastures. Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.
      - clarionbell 25d ago
        Sort of yes. But it's nowhere near as much as some would like to believe. It mostly concerns those who have unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money. Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.
        Towaway69 25d ago
        > unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money. Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. I thought this would be more to do with politics. So we’ll end up with ex-US folks starting up those European companies that decouple Europe from US tech! (Thats tongue in cheek.)
tangled 25d ago
Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.
- pembrook 25d ago
  [flagged]
  - AureliusMA 25d ago
    This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.
    - pembrook 25d ago
      Can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements? AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less? The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow. In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language. There were people like Kalgeri who had a vision for a 'united states of europe,' which arguably would have been better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.
zoobab 25d ago
Still no training data in sight. Maybe we need to abolish copyright?
baq 25d ago
10-20x more still needed, and then somewhere to build a couple DCs. Fingers crossed they make it, neither US nor Chinese labs can be trusted, even with open weights.
nik736 25d ago
Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the effort that they release those models as open weight but Gemma 4 models are currently way easier to run with more tok/s and less hardware. Their API pricing is just insane for what you get. But I guess enterprise customers don't care about it, this is why they are probably not lowering it.
- BoredomIsFun 25d ago
  > Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.
  - nik736 25d ago
    Mistral Small 4 is also a MoE model, with way more params, so I would expect it to perform better. Our benchmark involves around 10% communication and writing in German and English and Gemma 4 26B A4B beats it although creative writing is the only category in our benchmark which might be a bit subjective.
darkteflon 25d ago
Surely outfits like Sakana will be looking at a similar strategy. The White House / Anthropic spat supercharged all this.
Tepix 25d ago
I really hope that Mistral will catch up. I'm left wondering why so many Chinese labs manage to be competitive. Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?
whazor 25d ago
It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models. An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models. With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.
- rhdunn 25d ago
  It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently. It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training). Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.
  - raumgeist 25d ago
    On a higher level it might make sense to build the expertise that comes with base training. I dont know enough about the process to estimate these gains, but china has been doing it in manufacturing for decades. All the money in the world is useless when no one knows how to do the thing
Vineetyadav2 25d ago
another ponji scheme
deleted 25d ago
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piyush_patel_ha 25d ago
I have used some of models of mistral, I'm liking where they're heading.
JanTurnherr 25d ago
I'm using Mistral for a local VN Proofreader and its by far the best Local 14B Model for this specific use case.
- alex_duf 25d ago
  What's VN in this context?
  - JanTurnherr 25d ago
    A Visual Novel. Its from a Software-Engineering standpoint interesting, since the requirements for this specific Use-Case are immense.
marsven_422 25d ago
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glimshe 25d ago
I know a lot of people who use AI, but literally nobody who uses Mistral.
poisonborz 25d ago
For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.
- pimeys 25d ago
  They try to build them, but for example in Finland where there's cheap electricity and lot of interest to build them, the people started protesting on rising electricity prices and now the politicians are noticing this. Same in Denmark.
- olowe 25d ago
  Mistral now serves GLM-5.2: https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-compute/ https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...
- alansaber 25d ago
  For our data centres we must go to the one place not yet corrupted by capitalism- space!
  - raumgeist 25d ago
    They will also be faster in space. Relatively. The data transmission might be the bottleneck then, but who knows - a rocket full of ssds might go a long way.
jeanmichelselli 25d ago
I just hope they don't become the new OpenAI...
brokegrammer 25d ago
I love Mistral and I use it whenever I don't care about quality. For example, it's my go to model for generating git commit messages by leveraging their free codestral model. I wouldn't pay for it though.
Yash16 25d ago
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kensai 25d ago
Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.
- smurf9852 25d ago
  Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody. Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.
  - deleted 25d ago
    [deleted]
  - znnajdla 25d ago
    Never underestimate a small dedicated underdog. You never know who might catch up later in the race
phtrivier 25d ago
The vibe in the conversation seems new to me. As if we're crossing a section in the "First they ignore you, then laugh at you, then hate you, etc..." Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?
- TMWNN 25d ago
  Quite the opposite. I remember when Mistral was talked about seriously as a frontier model lab. That certainly isn't the sentiment here.
petcat 25d ago
EU is in a precarious situation with Mistral. If you look at their investor sheet, it's primarily American and other foreign investors with some token amount coming from within the EU. It seems like this is positioning as an acquisition play, most likely by a foreign AI tech firm. We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and capital market being uncompetitive, and then within 2 years just relocated entirely to the US. My suspicion is that Mistral does not have enough money and enough access to GPU compute to be competitive long-term. And it will most likely end up as an acquisition.
- barrenko 25d ago
  " And it will most likely end up as an acquisition." if they were really a thread, OAI / Anthropic would probably have swallowed them up by now, they're just going to go a decade as a EU zombie consultancy. I hope I'm wrong here.
asimpleusecase 25d ago
So what happens when Mistral creates a collection of powerful AIs for different clients that have fundamentally different ethical frameworks from each other? Then those AI interact? Do they politely agree to disagree? Or do they goal seek against each other?
capocasa 25d ago
Last time I tried Mistral large it was pretty bad at programming but I hear they're fairly good at European language legal.
hn5nw0vcqg 25d ago
[dead]
sbinnee 25d ago
I am still waiting for their large model. Seemingly they only recently started combining reasoning, agentic, and multimodal in one model. They have mistral-3.5 medium and mistral-4 small. There is no 3.5 small nor large not to mention no 4 medium nor 4 large. These model numbers to me seem like that their model release did not meet the schedule. I am still waiting for 4 large and expect it to match at least glm 5.2 performance.
barrenko 25d ago
My dudes, the EU doesn't have enough gas to survive the following winter, let alone if Poutine decides to go around Ukraine and test NATO in production. Mistral is the cherry on the sundae of our concerns. It's a spiritual thing.
novoreorx 25d ago
Mistral is quite fast for my proofreading tasks. I've benchmarked various LLM providers on my Singapore and Hong Kong VPS instances, and `mistral-small-latest` was the fastest. The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed
cmiles8 25d ago
Congrats. They are well positioned on the sovereignty play. We live in crazy times where 3B seems like a conservative number for a company focused on the right use cases, but in this bubble environment 3B is conservative.
Decabytes 25d ago
So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that. Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excited about it
- s_dev 25d ago
  Power generates healthy scepticism and contempt. Since Mistral has very little relative to other AI companies it doesn't draw the same ire. Like Lovable they seem to settling in to a niche but in this case supplying AI to large EU firms rather than acting as a standin for Wordpress/Squarespace etc. From a consumer point of view I'm still angry with them for having supplied me with 1 month of premium despite having paid for 11 months. That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.
  - xquce 25d ago
    “That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.” First time hearing someone claim consumer protections are better in the US and the EU. People lose whole decades of data from top world top 10 largest US companies and those have no service and no consumer protection in the US nor court justice ad those where waived in their ToS. If you didn't get the product you purchased and are in the EU you can take it to your ombudsman
max-privatevoid 25d ago
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on Didn't know Mistral sold affordable inference hardware. /s
wolttam 25d ago
I don’t get the push on infra. Focus on the models
MetroWind 25d ago
A news article without a date? I've seen everything.
ssonal 25d ago
They were one of the earliest to pull out of the frontier treadmill, and focus on the sovereign AI narrative. Local champion is a very sensible place to be given today's market conditions. Business not limited to Europe though. Growing fast all through Asia as well.
Simon_O_Rourke 25d ago
Good for them!
Avlin67 25d ago
will they release great open sources models to use ?
inemesitaffia 25d ago
Add zero and I'll take it seriously
rldjbpin 24d ago
we got access to their platform from work. the "best" model, or the one i've used the most so far is GLM-5.2! for all the promise, i would temper my expectations for a frontier model for coding or general purpose. but for niche use cases (document parsing, voice*, etc.) and as a platform to handle finetuned versions, etc. for small-ish pilots, i can see the value of partnering with them. if the core model could be any open-weights solution out there, the moat dissolves really quickly.

Mistral raises €3B

850 points by kuberwastaken 25d ago

sznio 25d ago

> Existing investors a16z I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in

0x20cowboy 25d ago
Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
- hallgrim 25d ago
  If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.
  - shrubby 25d ago
    https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_for_american_democracy_w_gil_duran https://techwontsave.us/episode/342_tech_fascism_has_come_fo... Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.
  - ghurtado 25d ago
    Ok, so once again South Park sounds completely deranged when they let reality do the writing. I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.
  - vlyan 25d ago
    to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing. Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.
    - vintagedave 25d ago
      Other than investment, such as this news? I know AI has more regulations here in the EU, but what I don't see clearly explained is what impact that has on pure research: creating new comparable models. So I'm suspicious that it's really impactful. On market deployment, maybe - that's where regulations lie. On internal company research?
    - wongarsu 25d ago
      Most things in the EU AI Act are entirely reasonable. On its own it's a pretty sensible piece of legislation. But the US and China are incredibly lenient on enforcing even existing laws against their AI companies. In the US the standard seems to be "no instructions to make bombs or drugs, and the ability to make porn of living people has to be restricted to paid users". Laws around cyber security and copyright that used to be heavily enforced are seemingly suspended for AI companies, or settled out of court. No company that tries to actually follow the law can compete with that
      - pembrook 25d ago
        On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable. It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.
    - __alexs 25d ago
      Regulation might have something to do with it but your example doesn't show that imo. Multiple US labs were taken to court over copyright infringment for their training data. Mistral did the same data mining, but actually the copyright situation is weaker here so it's harder to build a case against them. I think the capital situation in EU is just worse. A lot of is tied up in more conservative businesses that are reluctant to bet the house on some shiny new thing.
  - Hikikomori 25d ago
    Their brains were broken because the government still has the ability to say no to them in some cases.
  - BoredomIsFun 25d ago
    > seen as the inhibitors of progress I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress. What a load of delusion.
- bayarearefugee 25d ago
  [flagged]
  - speedgoose 25d ago
    I’m no expert in religion, but wouldn’t Jesus speech be more on the Greta side if he came back to earth today? By like a very very wide margin?
    - ReptileMan 25d ago
      He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds.
      - phtrivier 25d ago
        The whole "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” also hints at _something_. But, I guess some very religious people did not got all the subtleties of "Thou shall not kill" yet, do, let's give everyone another 2000 years to process the idea. (Also, maybe it's hard for a camel, but easier in ocaml ? I'll have to try marketing "Static typing as a way to reach heaven")
      - andsoitis 25d ago
        > He throwed the moneychangers out of the temple - so I guess he had a short temper for stupid frauds. He also expelled demons from a man and conceded to their request to be installed in 2,000 pigs. That led to them drowning, causing substantial destruction of somebody else’s property for no obvious practical necessity. The local people become frightened and ask Jesus to leave their region.
    - graemep 25d ago
      Given what Jesus had to say about the rich, yes, definitely. Thiel called one of his companies Palantir which is weird too.
    - bayarearefugee 25d ago
- luplex 25d ago
  No, Thiel is talking about the UN and global minimum taxes when he talks about the Antichrist.
Frieren 25d ago
This is why wealth should be less concentrated. A few people has their hands in all businesses and that will end badly. Taxation is not just about paying for the costs of the country, it is also about making sure that nobody has enough power to subjugate the will of the people. Monopolies, billionaires, the accumulation of such power is making the average citizen powerless. And you can feel it.
- shrubby 25d ago
  The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger. Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power. This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.
  - maxrev17 25d ago
    Yeah it’s ’more more more’. Seems a very nature based behaviour. We need a restraint or predator to slow us off!
    - skeledrew 25d ago
      It's default behavior due to scarcity. Remove that permanently and there's no longer incentive to be greedy.
  - Frieren 25d ago
    > Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses Taxation can and must solve it before "society collapses". And many people are working to solve the problem. It is difficult and requires effort but nothing that has not been done before. We got rid of king (by the will of god) in the past so techno-power-hungry cringey businessmen should be easier.
    - shrubby 25d ago
      Yup. I tried to say that conventional taxation is not enough. As the power is hidden in Panama bank accounts we need to figure out means beyond taxation to neutralize it as it being used to obliterate the future.

0x20cowboy 25d ago

Très bien! C’est parti!

steinvakt2 25d ago

That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?

danmaz74 25d ago
At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
hobofan 25d ago
Are they, though? I would say, let's find out when the IPO settles, but then again the market also sustains a incredibly crazy valuation for Tesla.
- steinvakt2 25d ago
  If not, I’m buying stocks
  - nicce 25d ago
    Better to buy GPUs and RAM with current rate
shikck200 25d ago
Nah. They are not, everyone is losing money, and just staying alive from gov subsidies. A claude PRO license is 20 usd/month, and for it to be profitable it should be somewhere around 200-300/month. The bubble is going to burst soon.
- skeledrew 25d ago
  I think the Pro and other subs allow them to save big on ads (Claude Code use is required and it pushes their ads) and allow easy access to free data (CC occasionally solicits feedback and session sharing, which I'm pretty sure some users oblige). Also CC does massive prompt caching tailored to work in lockstep with their platform. With all that and who knows what else, I'd say it balances over time.

keel-control 25d ago

I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.

ludvigk 25d ago
Same here. And I doubt 3B EUR will do anything (remember the >$100B investment round that OpenAI got?) In the EU it seems we are very much at risk of being cut off from frontier AI if the US government should decide to do so.
- cbg0 25d ago
  Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 25d ago
  OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.
  - clarionbell 25d ago
    If EU were to "leverage" ASML, and that would require rather unlikely approval of Netherlands, it wouldn't end very well. Already shipped machines can not be taken back, nor can they be stopped. Sure, you can cut the support, and buildup of new fabs will be stalled. But the other side, Chinese or USA, has many more levers to pull. Raw materials, energy (LNG), was majority of consumer goods, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors. EU doesn't mine or make most of them, and isn't nowhere close to even starting, instead, industrial base is already shrinking. Even worse, ASML may dominate EUV, but other suppliers do very well in DUV. The moment ASML becomes unreliable, all of them will get infusion of money, as they become national security issue. What about ASML subsidiaries in USA, like Cymer and ASML Wilton, will they take the bullet for the parent? Or will they become part of new competitor, with all the knowhow. And China has already set domestic capacities in this area as a national priority.

ajjahs 25d ago

[dead]

v3ss0n 25d ago

No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.

w4yai 25d ago
I actually believe the amount of $ is what was missing for them to improve their fundamental flaws. They're a very competent team, but were working with a tiny fraction of the budget of US/China teams.
- smurf9852 25d ago
  You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.
  - disgruntledphd2 25d ago
    > Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding. But they're not competing (offically at least) for GPUs and they have much, much cheaper electricity (which makes pre-training more affordable).
mosselman 25d ago
They've started hosting GLM-5.2, that should be very telling of their capabilities at the moment. Hopefully the investment will allow them to hire the right people to become competitive.
Raed667 25d ago
can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
- chronic7304 25d ago
  > can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds? Culture. In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture. Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

lain98 25d ago

I've been applying to jobs at Mistral, just straight rejects. Not even a phone call :(

elvennn 25d ago
I applied, I had multiple interviews, I got reject because I was bad during them. Anyway, the interview process was so janky it decreased my confidence in their success.
- selestify 25d ago
  Care to share any more?
tasoeur 25d ago
I’ve heard many folks get rejected and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Interviews should make you feel like you’ve failed due to you not being quite there while still recommending friends to apply (“I didn’t make it but you should try to apply!” Vs “i felt like I had the privilege of even talking to the dude and then got ghosted”).
colesantiago 25d ago
Instead of trying to get into Mistral, why don't you make your own Mistral? Not easy as it sounds yes, but it is better than throwing your CV into the ATS void 1000 times (the wrong way to apply for a job btw) Mistral have no moat as it seems except some 'regulatory' moat.
- rytsEa 25d ago
  I am sure plenty of people had the same thought.
  - colesantiago 25d ago
    Not many can execute, but people are welcome to try if you can get customers. Better than throwing CVs everywhere with no response for years.

Morkeeth 25d ago

Europes last chance

throwa356262 25d ago
I don't know. The moat doesn't seem to exist. Probably safer to stay out of the race for now.
- alansaber 25d ago
  Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?
- aurareturn 25d ago
  I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS. That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.
  - throwa356262 25d ago
    My reasoning is that we have seen multiple small labs come out of nowhere and create impressive models.
    - aurareturn 25d ago
      Impressive doesn't mean sustainable. We're also seeing behemoths like Google and Meta both fail to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has given up on SOTA training. Loads of once promising LLM training companies are no longer relevant at the SOTA stage such as Cohere, Mistral. I've said this countless times but SOTA LLM market looks like a classic monopoly/duopoly market over time. Each generation requires magnitudes more resources to train and you can only compete if you've made enough money on your previous generation.
      - 25d ago

CerebralCoding 25d ago

Too bad Mistral fucking sucks

donmb 25d ago

Mistral is not that bad as the comments here suggest. I am not using it as a frontier model but with simple RAG tasks and its doing great. Also OCR is pretty decent. It's a positive development that Europe is at least trying. Alternative would be: do nothing.

HenrikPontoppid 25d ago
When it comes to what really matters, they're far behind and probably will not catch up. It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing. Everyone is fundamentally selling the same thing, so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing. Sure, Mistral has a "Made in Europe" edge, but any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself. Also, €3B is nothing in this market, especially when you're competing with more efficient competitors. €3B in Europe is probably the same as €10B in the USA and €20B or €30B in China.
- Slartie 25d ago
  Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait... > so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.
  - HenrikPontoppid 25d ago
    The value of these companies is not defined entirely by the state of their current models. A much more important signal is their chance of having the best model in the future. Just like with anything having to do with investment, this is the castle in the sky. Also, shame on me for simplifying things so much - but I still believe in my original sentiment.

davedx 25d ago

Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

dwedge 25d ago
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
- intended 25d ago
  It bears repeating - all markets get regulated. Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers. But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious. To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.
  - 21asdffdsa12 25d ago
    And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
    - nickpp 25d ago
      Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore. I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
      - 25d ago

cl-coder 25d ago

So I suppose mistral-large-4 then in a few months?

AidenVennis 25d ago

I really do hope they can catch up with the American models, but I think setting the Chinese models as the goal would be best. They seems to be able to create great models with low cost that are probably useful for 90% of the day to day tasks. Mistral should not focus on competing with Claude Fable or OpenAI's Astra at first but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet. The fact that it's European will be enough to be used by a lot of companies and governments in the EU that are (trying to) move away from US tech.

Traubenfuchs 25d ago
> but have a good EU alternative to Opus or even Sonnet They would if they could, which means they can‘t, even though they want to.

shevy-java 25d ago

They are all responsible for driving up RAM prices. I want my money back.

ph4rsikal 25d ago

Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.

BenoitP 25d ago
And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's. Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.
- eloisant 25d ago
  Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.
- dist-epoch 25d ago
  if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one
antupis 25d ago
Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.
alansaber 25d ago
The question is not, will mistral be able to create the best models (seems bloody unlikely). The question is, will mistral have enough expertise to dominate its business use-case, which is the model infra/deployment market within the EU (which is more plausible, with even a 3rd, 4th, 5th best model development team).
tensor 25d ago
The big US labs are naively hoping that compute power will always be their moat. I strongly suspect they are dead wrong, and newer architectures will require vastly less training data and outperform the brute force approach of US labs.

nalekberov 25d ago

"Mistral raises €3B to make sovereign, open-weight AI the technology frontier". Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable, indeed, one receives this much money just for sovereignty's sake.

philipwhiuk 25d ago
The US invested billions to ensure sovereign launch capability. Seems to have paid off.

tasoeur 25d ago

Last I saw job offers for mistral (engineering, Paris) it advertised 90k euros base salary. Not sure how they’re intending to compete with the US when even a top AI lab can’t afford to be competitive :-/

kome 25d ago
some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
- tasoeur 25d ago
  I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.
  - Towaway69 25d ago
    > researchers may be looking for greener pastures. Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.
    - clarionbell 25d ago
      Sort of yes. But it's nowhere near as much as some would like to believe. It mostly concerns those who have unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money. Now, that is quite a lot of people. But not nearly enough to reverse decades of brain drain.
      - Towaway69 25d ago
        > unclear immigration status, had their funding cut off, or don't care about money. Ah ok, thanks for the clarification. I thought this would be more to do with politics. So we’ll end up with ex-US folks starting up those European companies that decouple Europe from US tech! (Thats tongue in cheek.)

tangled 25d ago

Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky. LLMs embody value systems, and American and European values are not the same (yes, there are overlaps, but also key differences). More nefariously, I can also imagine LLMs that silently degrade their reasoning when used in a national security context of a non-US country. So, Mistral may not be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, but in many contexts that doesn’t matter. And, perhaps this gap could be closed with more funding (the three billion funding figure is a rounding error next to US labs). I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

pembrook 25d ago
[flagged]
- AureliusMA 25d ago
  This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.
  - pembrook 25d ago
    Can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements? AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less? The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow. In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language. There were people like Kalgeri who had a vision for a 'united states of europe,' which arguably would have been better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.

zoobab 25d ago

Still no training data in sight. Maybe we need to abolish copyright?

baq 25d ago

10-20x more still needed, and then somewhere to build a couple DCs. Fingers crossed they make it, neither US nor Chinese labs can be trusted, even with open weights.

nik736 25d ago

Mistral has solid OCR, STT and TTS models and I would love to support them by switching with all of our business workloads to Mistral... but their LLM models are sadly not competitive at all. In our business benchmarks their Mistral Medium 3.5 with reasoning is worse than Gemma 4 31B and Glimmer 30B. It's a 128B dense model that's priced accordingly! Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B. I applaude the effort that they release those models as open weight but Gemma 4 models are currently way easier to run with more tok/s and less hardware. Their API pricing is just insane for what you get. But I guess enterprise customers don't care about it, this is why they are probably not lowering it.

BoredomIsFun 25d ago
> Mistral Small 4 is way worse than Gemma 4 26B A4B Depends for what purpose? I found large Mistrals are massively better than Gemma 4 at creative writing: have more natural tone, better consistency than 26B as it is MoE.
- nik736 25d ago
  Mistral Small 4 is also a MoE model, with way more params, so I would expect it to perform better. Our benchmark involves around 10% communication and writing in German and English and Gemma 4 26B A4B beats it although creative writing is the only category in our benchmark which might be a bit subjective.

darkteflon 25d ago

Surely outfits like Sakana will be looking at a similar strategy. The White House / Anthropic spat supercharged all this.

Tepix 25d ago

I really hope that Mistral will catch up. I'm left wondering why so many Chinese labs manage to be competitive. Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?

whazor 25d ago

It makes no sense to train frontier models from scratch anymore. The best frontier models are only a half year ahead of Chinese open models. In this regard Anthropic and OpenAI are also in a bad spot when they waste so much compute on training models. An important factor is that fine tuning existing open models is incredible cheap. You can easily change any cultural biases if you want a model to be 'sovereign'. And Mistral could combine that with their custom data sets for their enterprise customer needs. Mistral still trains their own models, but they also seem to offer fine tuning existing models. With model weights being commoditized, another differentiator could be deploying efficient inference chips, especially if you combine it with a developer ecosystem for vendor lock-in. That is why it is interesting that both Samsung and ASML are investors, since they are companies that could make a difference in this area.

rhdunn 25d ago
It only makes sense to train a frontier model if you are trying a different architecture to one that is available from an existing frontier model. This is because the different model architecture will learn the weights differently. It may make sense to train a frontier model on an existing architecture if the base model is not available and the instruction trained version doesn't fit with what you want. There are techniques like ablation, but those could have other effects on the model, and there can still be lingering effects of the instruction training in the model that surface less frequently (e.g. on an input not covered by the ablation training). Otherwise, fine tuning is definitely the way to go. However, you need to be careful not to over-tune the model such that it is only tuned to the data you are training it on.
- raumgeist 25d ago
  On a higher level it might make sense to build the expertise that comes with base training. I dont know enough about the process to estimate these gains, but china has been doing it in manufacturing for decades. All the money in the world is useless when no one knows how to do the thing

Vineetyadav2 25d ago

another ponji scheme

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

piyush_patel_ha 25d ago

I have used some of models of mistral, I'm liking where they're heading.

JanTurnherr 25d ago

I'm using Mistral for a local VN Proofreader and its by far the best Local 14B Model for this specific use case.

alex_duf 25d ago
What's VN in this context?
- JanTurnherr 25d ago
  A Visual Novel. Its from a Software-Engineering standpoint interesting, since the requirements for this specific Use-Case are immense.

marsven_422 25d ago

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glimshe 25d ago

I know a lot of people who use AI, but literally nobody who uses Mistral.

poisonborz 25d ago

For all that say Mistral is "at least something" for EU: where are the big EU-owned datacenters where we can run Chinese SOTA models safely, and labs that fork and quantize them on EU data? Wouldn't that be "more something"? Even if this method still depends on external resources short term, it's a money problem, and EU just loves pouring money on problems.

pimeys 25d ago
They try to build them, but for example in Finland where there's cheap electricity and lot of interest to build them, the people started protesting on rising electricity prices and now the politicians are noticing this. Same in Denmark.
olowe 25d ago
Mistral now serves GLM-5.2: https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-compute/ https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...
alansaber 25d ago
For our data centres we must go to the one place not yet corrupted by capitalism- space!
- raumgeist 25d ago
  They will also be faster in space. Relatively. The data transmission might be the bottleneck then, but who knows - a rocket full of ssds might go a long way.

jeanmichelselli 25d ago

I just hope they don't become the new OpenAI...

brokegrammer 25d ago

I love Mistral and I use it whenever I don't care about quality. For example, it's my go to model for generating git commit messages by leveraging their free codestral model. I wouldn't pay for it though.

Yash16 25d ago

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kensai 25d ago

Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.

smurf9852 25d ago
Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody. Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.
- deleted 25d ago
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- znnajdla 25d ago
  Never underestimate a small dedicated underdog. You never know who might catch up later in the race

phtrivier 25d ago

The vibe in the conversation seems new to me. As if we're crossing a section in the "First they ignore you, then laugh at you, then hate you, etc..." Seems like they reached the laugh / hate border. Or am I the only one reading that ?

TMWNN 25d ago
Quite the opposite. I remember when Mistral was talked about seriously as a frontier model lab. That certainly isn't the sentiment here.

petcat 25d ago

EU is in a precarious situation with Mistral. If you look at their investor sheet, it's primarily American and other foreign investors with some token amount coming from within the EU. It seems like this is positioning as an acquisition play, most likely by a foreign AI tech firm. We can look at Heart Aerospace for an example of a European future-tech company that warned the EU repeatedly about the regulatory and capital market being uncompetitive, and then within 2 years just relocated entirely to the US. My suspicion is that Mistral does not have enough money and enough access to GPU compute to be competitive long-term. And it will most likely end up as an acquisition.

barrenko 25d ago
" And it will most likely end up as an acquisition." if they were really a thread, OAI / Anthropic would probably have swallowed them up by now, they're just going to go a decade as a EU zombie consultancy. I hope I'm wrong here.

asimpleusecase 25d ago

So what happens when Mistral creates a collection of powerful AIs for different clients that have fundamentally different ethical frameworks from each other? Then those AI interact? Do they politely agree to disagree? Or do they goal seek against each other?

capocasa 25d ago

Last time I tried Mistral large it was pretty bad at programming but I hear they're fairly good at European language legal.

hn5nw0vcqg 25d ago

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sbinnee 25d ago

I am still waiting for their large model. Seemingly they only recently started combining reasoning, agentic, and multimodal in one model. They have mistral-3.5 medium and mistral-4 small. There is no 3.5 small nor large not to mention no 4 medium nor 4 large. These model numbers to me seem like that their model release did not meet the schedule. I am still waiting for 4 large and expect it to match at least glm 5.2 performance.

barrenko 25d ago

My dudes, the EU doesn't have enough gas to survive the following winter, let alone if Poutine decides to go around Ukraine and test NATO in production. Mistral is the cherry on the sundae of our concerns. It's a spiritual thing.

novoreorx 25d ago

Mistral is quite fast for my proofreading tasks. I've benchmarked various LLM providers on my Singapore and Hong Kong VPS instances, and `mistral-small-latest` was the fastest. The quality was not that high tho, but it is worth it for the speed

cmiles8 25d ago

Congrats. They are well positioned on the sovereignty play. We live in crazy times where 3B seems like a conservative number for a company focused on the right use cases, but in this bubble environment 3B is conservative.

Decabytes 25d ago

So what is the sentiment on Mistral? Does it get the same hate as other AI companies? Or does its European and open focus make people give it some slack? It doesn’t really seem like anti AI people care if something was AI generated with Mistral vs something else. If it’s AI generated it is bad and that’s that. Doesn’t seem like if LibreOffice partnered with Mistral for more ethical AI features, people would be excited about it

s_dev 25d ago
Power generates healthy scepticism and contempt. Since Mistral has very little relative to other AI companies it doesn't draw the same ire. Like Lovable they seem to settling in to a niche but in this case supplying AI to large EU firms rather than acting as a standin for Wordpress/Squarespace etc. From a consumer point of view I'm still angry with them for having supplied me with 1 month of premium despite having paid for 11 months. That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.
- xquce 25d ago
  “That kind of poor customer service just won't fly in the US.” First time hearing someone claim consumer protections are better in the US and the EU. People lose whole decades of data from top world top 10 largest US companies and those have no service and no consumer protection in the US nor court justice ad those where waived in their ToS. If you didn't get the product you purchased and are in the EU you can take it to your ombudsman

max-privatevoid 25d ago

> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on Didn't know Mistral sold affordable inference hardware. /s

wolttam 25d ago

I don’t get the push on infra. Focus on the models

MetroWind 25d ago

A news article without a date? I've seen everything.

ssonal 25d ago

They were one of the earliest to pull out of the frontier treadmill, and focus on the sovereign AI narrative. Local champion is a very sensible place to be given today's market conditions. Business not limited to Europe though. Growing fast all through Asia as well.

Simon_O_Rourke 25d ago

Good for them!

Avlin67 25d ago

will they release great open sources models to use ?

inemesitaffia 25d ago

Add zero and I'll take it seriously

rldjbpin 24d ago

we got access to their platform from work. the "best" model, or the one i've used the most so far is GLM-5.2! for all the promise, i would temper my expectations for a frontier model for coding or general purpose. but for niche use cases (document parsing, voice*, etc.) and as a platform to handle finetuned versions, etc. for small-ish pilots, i can see the value of partnering with them. if the core model could be any open-weights solution out there, the moat dissolves really quickly.