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  • Hacker News
  • Très bien! C’est parti!
    by 0x20cowboy
  • That’s great, but meanwhile American competitors are worth… trillions?
    by steinvakt2
  • 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.

    by shikck200
  • At this stage it's not about how much it's worth, but how much investment is required to reach their goals.
    by danmaz74
  • 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.
    by hobofan
  • *losing trillions
    by Daunk
  • 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.
    by AidenVennis
  • > 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.

    by Traubenfuchs
  • Still no training data in sight.

    Maybe we need to abolish copyright?

    by zoobab
  • 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 :-/
    by tasoeur
  • some people would rather live in paris than los angels or san francisco (and rightly so, if you ask me)...
    by kome
  • 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.
    by keel-control
  • They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.
    by koe123
  • Maybe true for frontier LLM, but there's plenty of space in the niches. For example, I think their TTS/STT models are pretty good, speaking from personal experience.
    by loehnsberg
  • 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.

    by ludvigk
  • That may be true, but there's a non zero chance that frontier AI becomes a controlled export, and that 'local' production becomes a prudent play.
    by alastairr
  • > Existing investors a16z

    I don't trust anything the antichrist invests in

    by sznio
  • 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.

    by Frieren
  • Is that who Thiel is talking about? I thought it was just a bible thing.
    by 0x20cowboy
  • 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
  • There is nothing exciting about mistral but they're the only european ai lab i've even heard off (jeppa doesn't count)
    by alansaber
  • Honestly 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.
    by koe123
  • can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?
    by Raed667
  • 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.
    by mosselman
  • If 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.
    by impossiblefork
  • 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.
    by w4yai
  • Mistral's annual revenue (700M) is what Anthropic generates in 3 days. It will be extremely difficult to build new models with these numbers.
    by ph4rsikal
  • 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.
    by antupis
  • 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.

    by BenoitP
  • 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.
    by donmb