Mistral raises €3B (mistral.ai)

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.

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"

Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.

So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.

Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it

And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.

As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.

What moat does Google have that's so special in search?

You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.

OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.

When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.

Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.

OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.

Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.

EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.

Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:

- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).

- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.

- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.

The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.

You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

Where in the fuck did we stall out?

If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.

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.

Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*

*…and the Chinese equivalents.

There is no close second, because the AA Index points are expentially harder to get as you get closer to the first.

They are simultaneously first: the two leapfrog each other with regularity, and are meaningfully ahead of the competition.

Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers.

This is supposed to be a success story?

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 the worst of both worlds. 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 early 1900s national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem.

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

But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left will call you an evil capitalist for dreaming of pro-market policy.

Is that still a thing? Or have those would leave have left, after all, it's been ~6 years of Trump already.

Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.

UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.

That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.

I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.

Way to reduce a multi dimensional concept into a single scalar value. Care to explain what exactly make it inferior? Try using more than one word if you can.

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).

> 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?

Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.

Here's a nice summary. Haven't read the book yet though it's on my list.

I miss when "reality is stranger than fiction" was a cool phrase because it didn't happen all the time.

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.

I become the government institution, the inhibitor of progress.

What a load of delusion.

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.

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.

Seriously "thought to be" is such a baseless statement. Thought to be by whom? And on what basis?