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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
by davedx 24d 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 24d agoThey are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
- intended 24d agoIt 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 24d agoAnd in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
- nickpp 24d agoGreat 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.
- notahacker 24d ago> 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. I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...
- intended 23d agoBut Boeing and Airbus kept desiging and building new and improved planes. There are multiple aircraft manufacturers for smaller aircraft, and there are several showing up for electric aircraft today. For jets, the capex required to build them is massive, and its never going to have an upstart just up and build a jet. The regulations in place are the reason why its safe to fly, and airlines have the safety records they do. This is the degree of safety end consumers want to be reassured that its safe to fly. The checks and balances in places create the market that you are hoping to give over to cheaper upstarts. The market doesn't exist without that safety regulation. See how people feel uneasy when flying Boeing after the decay of their engineering and quality culture became public knowledge.
- prolly97 24d agoThere's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers. Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.
- boonzeet 24d agoThere are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to: Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial) The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.
- ricardobayes 24d agoI wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad. We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic. Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
- prolly97 24d ago>Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
- blfr 24d agoRight now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks. I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.
- vichle 24d agoThey've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.
- blfr 24d agoWhy hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.
- t43562 24d agoThese are effective monopolies competing to become super monopolies - the period leading up to dominance by one or two is beneficial to consumers with freebies and cheap offers that also completely lock out any smaller players. If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
- robotresearcher 23d agoYou do. ASML, ARM, Linux (originally), Spotify, Logitech. Novartis, Astra Zenica.
- nickpp 24d agoAnd it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.
- intended 24d agoYes. This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction. It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion. Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale. The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well. Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself. This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological. If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
- nickpp 23d ago> If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring. Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care. Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software.
- intended 23d ago> Actually, in the real world, the worst markets are also the strongest regulated: housing, education and health care. > Meanwhile the fields that got to be regulated last brought us the most wealth, advances and innovation: high tech & software. Financial markets are highly regulated. They are one of the most structured markets out there. The outcomes in all those markets, whether they are good or bad, is a direct result of how the markets are structured. The 2008 financial crisis, for example, was a direct result of regulators being defanged and underfunded for multiple years. If you look at technology: innovation amazing in the era of unlimited horizons, the era of "move fast and break things." However, the cost of externalities from inventions like social media, were not captured in that market structure. This means that firms can absolutely pollute or addict people in the information economy, capturing the profit but socializing the costs. The ability of dominant players to consume/acquihire upstarts and keep their market position, is a drag on innovation and consumer outcomes today. The situation that was faced in the early days of a new technology is different than what is faced in its maturity, when the advantages of the nimble upstart give way to the massive overlord. At each stage, you have to craft the incentives and rules to ensure you achieve the outcomes you (as a nation) actually priortize.
- ywvcbk 24d ago> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers. True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
- mazurnification 24d agoThis is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.
- pavlov 24d agoAfter living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior. My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU). When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.
- dwedge 24d agoSure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good
- Aeolos 24d agoDid you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?
- eloisant 24d agoYes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.
- stanac 24d agoDidn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....
- notahacker 24d agoThey've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...
- dns_snek 24d agoWhich provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?
- mhitza 23d agoRead this https://europe.mistral.ai/ https://europe.mistral.ai/ if you can bare to go through the slop, has it's share of regulatory capture strategy. Here's the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743700
- BoredomIsFun 24d ago> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them. To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.
- hobofan 24d agoRegulation != censorship. (Apart from that, Mistral has Shieldstral[0] for adding policy enforcement). With it's general approach of Open Weights, and being able to be deployed on-premise (/private/public cloud), they are a viable solution for your typical European enterprise, that has to comply with traditional (non-AI) regulation. With the NIS2 directive the amount of those companies is also significantly expanding. We[1] are in the same market as Mistral, and among our customers, the go-to-solution of MS Copilot is typically performing badly, and the typical SaaS solutions are not even given a consideration, which is why they are reaching for on-premise-first solutions. [0]: https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/ https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/ [1]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato https://github.com/EratoLab/erato
- davedx 24d agoDon't make me laugh. Who has actually sat in Congress and told congress leaders to push regulatory capture? Not Mistral
- stymaar 24d agoYou're confusing with Anthropic . They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy. Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.
- matusp 24d agoThis is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.
- black_puppydog 24d agoWe're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
- randomgermanguy 24d agoBut a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models. So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated. Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
- oblio 24d agoI would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something. We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper. If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
- shevy-java 24d agoI fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas. Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
- himata4113 24d agoBecause it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
- ulfw 24d agoLOL yea as if that was the reason for LLMs
- 21asdffdsa12 24d agoBecause humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
- ulfw 24d agoPlease speak English so that an LLM can understand you
- mastermage 24d agoThe last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets. Where in the fuck did we stall out?
- 21asdffdsa12 24d ago
- alexfortin 24d agoI root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently). First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you). I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable. I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.
- ywvcbk 24d ago> once they're good enough for coding aid The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
- maxhille 24d agoThey are now serving GLM52 and the 15€ sub comes with a nice included quota. So I get good code assist and pay a EU company for it.
- alexfortin 22d agoServing GLM-5.2? can you elaborate?
- maxhille 22d agoThey switched from using mistral-medium to GLM 5.2 in Vibe
- blfr 24d agoI don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case. But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.
- zorked 24d agoPeople have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.
- blfr 24d agoIt's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
- slopinthebag 24d agoPeople said this for Opus 4.6 too. Every release the models get RLHF'ed into accomplishing a new task and the people who need to do this task think there was a step change.
- ifwinterco 24d agoTo be fair Opus 4.6 was genuinely a really good model when it came out, in fact I'm not sure Opus 5 is even any better. It's definitely a lot slower, though
- slopinthebag 24d agoYeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though. There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.
- tonyhart7 24d agoare you saying current frontier AI labs is benchmaxxxing and not because the AI model is good ????? You crazy to think that Fable and Astra capabilities is fake
- ahartmetz 24d agoThe winning strategy seems to be actual capabilities plus cheating.
- TheJCDenton 24d agoWhen Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. The two companies have read the market the same. It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
- InsideOutSanta 24d ago> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company. It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.
- etiennebausson 24d agoMistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start. They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
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- andy99 24d agoWhat’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?) I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
- catoc 24d agoWith how they’re currently being used we might as well call them bendmarks. Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.
- ywvcbk 24d agoRealistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
- jillesvangurp 24d agoThere are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market. The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms. Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running. You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.
- gvieri 24d agoI tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.
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- dzonga 24d agoI also think their business model is interesting in that they can also serve Chinese models e.g GLM and fine tune them for enterprises. which is a market Chinese labs won't get into. they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.
- mokre 24d agoHow you know that they are not realy benchmaxxxing? Maybe they just have skill issue in this olimpics.
- bsoqk 24d ago>They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out. It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place. Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".
- Bayart 24d agoMistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise. Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.
- Eldodi 24d agoIs it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well
- jatins 24d ago> clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs What’s contrarian? Dont they also sell API and subscription like every other lab?
- redox99 24d agoMistral models are way worse than Chinese models in the real world. It's not benchmarks.
- smurf9852 24d agoI want an intelligent model, which Mistral does not have.
- msh 24d agoI am European and would like European AI so I tried mistral this month. Their own models seems like years old OpenAI models, hallucinations all over the place and coding was crazy slow. I can only say two good things about them: - their hosted glm model was fast - because I canceled within 14 days they gave me a full refund.
- blackcat201 24d agowho says they aren't benchmaxxing?
- ur-whale 24d ago> they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. Yeah, spot on. I'd add they are also betting on building specialized AI's targeting narrow yet very profitable segment markets, where general AI's à la AnthroOpenAI don't work very well.
- tomaskafka 24d agoAs a potential user, I want a competent model (the definition is shifting as the SOTA improves), but Mistral doesn’t seem to be that.
- make3 24d agoThen your choice is either a US mega corp under the Trump partial dictatorship shitshow or a Chinese model distillation factory that could turn on you at any second. I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.
- HNIsAds 23d ago> People dump on them because Because this forum is sponsored by Claude and Anslopic. Anything against the narrative is attacked. Used mistral 7b locally for years - it’s fine. Their web version is like a slightly worse Gemini - also fine
- websap 23d agoSounds more like regulatory capture, than building state of art sovereign models.
- maxdo 23d agoSo they are parasites on sovereign blah blah blah. And yes , Chinese models will be cheaper compared to what they offer , as well as American models will be much smarter polished . This is the only market they have , lobby sovereignty among politicians.