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I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing
by ar0 4mo ago
I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO.
I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks.
- mattnewton 4mo agoMy theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral just doesn’t have access to this level of compute or the money to try and muscle their way in.
- MichaelZuo 4mo agoDon’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support? Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.
- baq 4mo agoThey can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago[flagged]
- bbor 4mo agoYou think they're intentionally being bad because they can't manage to pump $65B into a startup on a whim...?
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago[flagged]
- Bewelge 4mo agoWhat claims are you talking about? I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago[flagged]
- esperent 4mo agoNo, we want you to backup your claims and provide sources or stop adding pointless low effort anti-EU noise to the conversation. It's frustrating, any time there's any kind of discussion about anything European on HN it gets flooded with shallow, low effort "EU-bad" posts like your contributions here. If you're going to make that claim at least put some effort in.
- akie 4mo agoThis is a mostly American forum and some people want to piss on the EU to elevate themselves. Europeans do the same to the US but about politics, health care, work life balance, and quality of life. You know, the stuff that matters :D
- Tepix 4mo agoThe chinese labs manage to do it. Mistral should have enough money.
- wongarsu 4mo agoThe EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanisms It's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support
- snowpid 4mo agoChina is a way more corrupt country but this might be a benefit of less rules.
- codebolt 4mo agoChina has cheap coal powered electricity and leaders that make things happen. Europe has beaureaucrats that only love talking, high taxes and expensive energy.
- mattnewton 4mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)
- cowpig 4mo agoI think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.
- rolymath 4mo agoSo, more than 70% of the compute on earth?
- wongarsu 4mo agoMore than 5%, I assume. From the combination of "5% in the EU under European companies" and "each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU" I dont't think that was meant to be implied: the EU actually has access to more GPUs than those hosted by European companies in Europe, just as US labs have access to GPUs hosted outside the US
- tormeh 4mo agoIt's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.
- teiferer 4mo agoAnd a lot of the "funding" is through mutual deals with MSFT, Nvidia, etc. The Europeans have none of that and would need to pay in actual cash.
- selectively 4mo ago[dead]
- teiferer 4mo ago> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? Not ruthless enough and no backing by a corrupt govt administration that has no morals but focuses on self-enrichment instead. Might sound drastic but I think that's actually closer to the truth thn everbody likes to admit. > My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks. Exactly.
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoMy hope is that people working with less resources will need to push on ingenuity to do more with less, leading to innovations. But there’s certainly no guarantee of it
- pembrook 4mo ago> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-in-computers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with: 1. Money: less diverse private pension fund environment = less LPs to invest in VC funds = less VC dollars to invest in new ventures. European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds. This starves the private sector of capital while inflating the % of GDP driven by government spending every year (government pension funds buying government bonds in circular fashion enable runaway deficit spending...just like circular AI infrastructure spending). 2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents. 3. Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals). 4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc. It's not "culture" or Europeans being "lazy" as most people would claim. There's currently thousands of young french people working 80 hour weeks creating dumb consulting powerpoints or legacy investment banking deal memos as we speak. Ambitious people exist everywhere in equal proportion, they're just working on the wrong things. Europe can't compete in the digital revolution the same way they could compete in the industrial revolution due to various system design choices. Culture is simply the aesthetically observed byproducts of system design.
- dash2 4mo ago>The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals). Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.
- sofixa 4mo ago> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? Considering all their talk about new DCs and compute, and a few offhand comments, it sounded to me that compute is a big limitation.
- miki123211 4mo agoShould it, though? I think an European company, taking Chinese models, perhaps doing its own post-training on them and training the Chinese-ness out, with a great chat service, enterprise API and coding agent, could be pretty valuable in itself.