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No amount of $ would improve mistral if they cant fix fundamental flaws. They aren't even on par with chinese models a year ago.
by 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 agoI 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 agoYou 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 agoThey'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 agocan 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.
- alansaber 25d agoHoly oversimplification. Do you get all your information from the internet?
- ajjahs 25d ago[dead]
- chronic7304 25d ago[flagged]
- InsideOutSanta 25d agoShame them... for not working their employees into a heart attack at 40? I'm not sure if your hypothesis is correct. I personally don't think the crazy work hours are what make the US so competitive in tech. But even if it were, it's odd to call for shaming countries for having less insane work cultures.
- Foobar8568 25d agoLol, and Switzerland has high working hours, but I achieve less in 3 months than 3weeks in Paris. My US colleagues, like German one,just bullshit on reality of what they produce. Real problem is more on VC, autonomy and small companies.
- KronisLV 25d ago> We need to start shaming individual countries in addition to blanket EU. Reading this gave me a visceral disgust reaction. I have worked in the middle of the night here to be able to ship prod fixes for meeting deadlines. But that and even overtime should be exceptions rather than the norm. This better be bait, in which case good job but flagged anyways. Surely nobody would genuinely make the argument that workers should be worked to the bone? What I personally think could help would be less bureaucracy and regulation in regards to tech advancements (while preserving privacy of individuals), so that the time is used more efficiently, alongside significant investments.
- 25d ago
- alansaber 25d agoThey've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company
- skeledrew 25d ago"Frontier" is a relative, ever-changing target.
- adventured 25d agoIt's not really: it means those out in front. OpenAI, Anthropic, China
- skeledrew 25d agoThose in front can and will change over time, and regions determine what is measured in the first place. So if they want, the EU can for example define "frontier" as "models made by a European nation that score highest on Math benchmarks".
- AureliusMA 25d agoThey have done that in the past. I clearly remember the times when they dropped releases as a simple tweet and it made the front page of HN - just like the recent Chinese models releases.
- tristanj 25d agoChinese models are trained on dubiously collected model traces from Claude/OpenAI that are purchased from model routers. All the major Chinese models use this data. That's one reason they've been able to catch up with Anthropic/OpenAI so quickly, they have so much data. Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.
- alansaber 25d agoIt's dubiously collected data the whole way down. This is the AI industry.
- alansaber 25d agoThere is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
- jhuguet 25d agothere was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something
- ismailmaj 25d agoAll original scientist co-founders of H have left. From what I've seen in the past few months, Mistral is the unique European lab still trying to compete (I wouldn't count Poolside as EU).
- flaburgan 24d agoThere is Apertus from Switzerland, a real "lab" project, not a company one.
- impossiblefork 25d agoIf Mistral aren't going to distill other people's large models they obviously need to train their own large models. This obviously requires money for optimization, tuning and training hardware.
- koe123 25d agoHonestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.
- Oras 25d agoChinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue. I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
- koe123 25d agoMy feeling is that its a difference in how funding works in different places. The USA will go all in with the populations pensions on a gamble, the Chinese subsidize. This way of operating is typical for the EU. > Being one year behind is a skill issue E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing. > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, So it's not a skill issue?
- Oras 25d ago> > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, > So it's not a skill issue? I meant by offering sovereign cloud/inference, not for training. But even if it was for training, Chinese labs have limited supply of GPUs, look what they've done. So it is a skill issue. Also to clarify, I didn't mean European engineers' skills, I meant "you get what you pay for" as a company, that's why I hope they start offering better compensation to retain talent.
- koe123 25d agoUnderstood! Thats reasonable