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When 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

When 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 9d 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 9d ago
  Mistral 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.
  - deleted 9d ago
    [deleted]
  - andy99 8d ago
    What’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.
    - barrenko 8d ago
      Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
    - ben_w 8d ago
      We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it. Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do. But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely. I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security. But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having. This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
    - mhaberl 8d ago
      2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough 1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap 2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability. Most deployments don't need AGI In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it. Example: Case of a hospital flooded in emails. You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest. If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"
riffraff 9d ago
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI. Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
- deterministic 6d ago
  > "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights" Straight out of "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.
- moffkalast 9d ago
  Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?
  - rapind 8d ago
    I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models. I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
    - moffkalast 8d ago
      I don't think any Mistral model can match an open 30B-sized Qwen from a year ago, so right now they're not really a competitive alternative to anything at all. Except Voxtral perhaps, but that's very niche.
- madeofpalk 9d ago
  The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
ywvcbk 9d ago
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
pembrook 9d ago
Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history. Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software. Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.
TacticalCoder 9d ago
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling? In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.
hkt 9d ago
I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.
- philipallstar 9d ago
  They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
  - toyg 9d ago
    That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
    - philipallstar 9d ago
      True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
      - noir_lord 9d ago
        If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts. It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;). Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either. Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point. When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want. For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
ulfw 9d ago
AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies
niltecedu 9d ago
One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.
TheJCDenton 9d ago
They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading. Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison. Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.
elAhmo 9d ago
Apple is a hardware company.
ACCount37 9d ago
Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly. In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".
- dbspin 8d ago
  They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.
WhereIsTheTruth 9d ago
One is american, the other is european It's the same with gaming When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative
- PunchyHamster 9d ago
  > When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
  - alephnan 8d ago
    Well Microsoft’s PR machine is working overtime then because I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft doing this until this HN thread whereas Sony was everywhere on social media
  - WhereIsTheTruth 8d ago
    You are conflating two separate events: -2013 DRM/always online drama (reversed pre launch) -2023 shutdown of its physical release division, which is what triggered shift to digital only titles we are seeing now Different year, different mechanism, different reception and different press coverage
wraptile 9d ago
Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.
- ta20240528 9d ago
  "What does Mistral own?" Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.* *…and the Chinese equivalents.
  - wraptile 9d ago
    Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.
    - ta20240528 9d ago
      The wording of the CLOUD act prevents any American company from competing, but yes, other European-only companies could offer the same.
- jackgavigan 8d ago
  > ..but you're comparing apples to oranges. Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals. I’ll get my coat.
  - MSKJ 8d ago
    New product idea: AI coat. For only 20M tokens it will tell you the optimal number of buttons to button up* *Please verify results with human based weather perception
- vasco 8d ago
  Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?
serbuvlad 9d ago
Apple and Mistral are not in the same market. Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices. Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon). Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.
PunchyHamster 9d ago
Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM. Which is smart move
r_lee 8d ago
Apple is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison
- deleted 8d ago
  [deleted]
whywhywhywhy 8d ago
It's a mistake when Apple does it too, they're back in the same situation they were with Google Maps in the early iPhone days.
r4rf 8d ago
Lmao imagine saying Mistral and Apple are in the same position.. wtf.
radicalbyte 8d ago
Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%? From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not? I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
ignoramous 8d ago
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Also: When China does it, it is protectionism; when Europe does it, it is sovereignty.
wiseowise 8d ago
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Ah, yes, it is really baffling that Mistral, a new European AI startup, is held to a different standard compared to a unique, 50 year old, software + hardware, 4.5 TRILLION dollar market cap company. A truly mystery of our times.

InsideOutSanta 9d 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 9d ago
Mistral 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.
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
- andy99 8d ago
  What’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.
  - barrenko 8d ago
    Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
  - ben_w 8d ago
    We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it. Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do. But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely. I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security. But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having. This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
  - mhaberl 8d ago
    2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough 1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap 2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability. Most deployments don't need AGI In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it. Example: Case of a hospital flooded in emails. You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest. If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"

riffraff 9d ago

I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI. Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".

deterministic 6d ago
> "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights" Straight out of "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.
moffkalast 9d ago
Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?
- rapind 8d ago
  I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models. I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.
  - moffkalast 8d ago
    I don't think any Mistral model can match an open 30B-sized Qwen from a year ago, so right now they're not really a competitive alternative to anything at all. Except Voxtral perhaps, but that's very niche.
madeofpalk 9d ago
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".

ywvcbk 9d ago

Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.

pembrook 9d ago

Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history. Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software. Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.

TacticalCoder 9d ago

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling? In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.

hkt 9d ago

I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.

philipallstar 9d ago
They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
- toyg 9d ago
  That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
  - philipallstar 9d ago
    True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
    - noir_lord 9d ago
      If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts. It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;). Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either. Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point. When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want. For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.

ulfw 9d ago

AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies

niltecedu 9d ago

One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.

TheJCDenton 9d ago

They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading. Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison. Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.

elAhmo 9d ago

Apple is a hardware company.

ACCount37 9d ago

Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly. In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".

dbspin 8d ago
They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.

WhereIsTheTruth 9d ago

One is american, the other is european It's the same with gaming When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

PunchyHamster 9d ago
> When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism" Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
- alephnan 8d ago
  Well Microsoft’s PR machine is working overtime then because I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft doing this until this HN thread whereas Sony was everywhere on social media
- WhereIsTheTruth 8d ago
  You are conflating two separate events: -2013 DRM/always online drama (reversed pre launch) -2023 shutdown of its physical release division, which is what triggered shift to digital only titles we are seeing now Different year, different mechanism, different reception and different press coverage

wraptile 9d ago

Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

ta20240528 9d ago
"What does Mistral own?" Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.* *…and the Chinese equivalents.
- wraptile 9d ago
  Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.
  - ta20240528 9d ago
    The wording of the CLOUD act prevents any American company from competing, but yes, other European-only companies could offer the same.
jackgavigan 8d ago
> ..but you're comparing apples to oranges. Actually, he’s comparing apples to mistrals. I’ll get my coat.
- MSKJ 8d ago
  New product idea: AI coat. For only 20M tokens it will tell you the optimal number of buttons to button up* *Please verify results with human based weather perception
vasco 8d ago
Here I was thinking Apple sold phones and you're saying they rent them out?

serbuvlad 9d ago

Apple and Mistral are not in the same market. Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices. Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon). Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.

PunchyHamster 9d ago

Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM. Which is smart move

r_lee 8d ago

Apple is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison

deleted 8d ago
[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 8d ago

It's a mistake when Apple does it too, they're back in the same situation they were with Google Maps in the early iPhone days.

r4rf 8d ago

Lmao imagine saying Mistral and Apple are in the same position.. wtf.

radicalbyte 8d ago

Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%? From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not? I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.

ignoramous 8d ago

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Also: When China does it, it is protectionism; when Europe does it, it is sovereignty.

wiseowise 8d ago

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake. Ah, yes, it is really baffling that Mistral, a new European AI startup, is held to a different standard compared to a unique, 50 year old, software + hardware, 4.5 TRILLION dollar market cap company. A truly mystery of our times.