France’s Mistral AI raises a $113M seed round to take on OpenAI
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Unless I missed it elsewhere in the article this part really glosses over something I have a hard time understanding. 113M seed round at a 240M valuation for a company that has no product yet and a plan to build something like something else that already exists. This feels insane to me.
Edit: I mean would you expect anything less than a slushfund or grift from an "America AI" project?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/lawsui...
I think Hippocratic is interesting because their leadership is business focused and not very technical, while a lot of other new foundational model cos are led by technical people. I’m curious how this shakes out.
It's a web blog. Not a "Forbes piece"
Do you mean Nokia's phones?
Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127938
> $400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising
> If the article is correct, they bought the team.
"When I was an intern, in one of the training presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish between the process and the results. He said that we should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he said, we don’t punish people for losing money for the right reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the wrong reason?"
Just like that old Dropbox comment that people love to bring up, you can make a gazillion dollars off a bad bet, and you can lose following a good strategy, that's the case everywhere probabilities are involved. Outcomes don't determine if the original evaluation was sound or not.
An example of a company that did that is all the Google X products - smart people not many great outcomes and a ton of capital.
Competent product/sales person, and engineering person seems missing for this to succeed. Especially if they used to rely on the eng infrastructure of giants.
They seem smart folks so probably can cover the software engineering gap, especially with $100m to outsource some of the hard problems to some cloud infra.
But I'd be more confident if they had started with a co-founder that's more product/sales oriented.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
Maybe. But there seems to be a reasonable investment case. Especially if the EU is making stupid laws, being the "European AI" company seems quite valuable.
- really smart people, that really graduated from the very best french schools
- that actually have real world experience in the top research facilities in the field, in the US.
- that know each others very well
- and don't rely solely on public funding (so they will definitely be held accountable for what they're doing with the money).
This is waaaaaayyyyy above what we're used to. So, i have to say : congrats to the team, and godspeed !
I find it shocking when people refer to what school someone went to as a credential in just about any context. I usually consider it a red flag, an indication that there is no functional understanding being applied in the evaluation
It would be more akin to "this car has a 5 stars EuroNCAP security rating, so it's pretty safe". But it doesn't mean you'll survive any crash.
those schools don't draft people based on bullshit application. It's a super super hardcore science exam that only a few dozen people per year pass. It's a bit like the putnam, with bachelor-level math and physics curriculum.
The mistake people make in France is to conclude that people coming from those schools will be good at just any position, management, running a huge company, etc. But in that specific case, they'll actually be doing hardcore science and ML all day long. It makes perfect sense.
About your comment about putting people in positions because of those diplomas, it's also because of the network you acquire at those kinds of schools, and cronyism. Granted, this kind of cronyism is less worse than in others countries where it can be more pernicious and less official :-)
It only means something if the school holds you to specifically high standards, which of course varies drastically.
Regarding European scandals, I'd throw in Siemens' corruption scandal, Contergan and every other one I forgot...
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Didn't the EU just pass an AI law that prohibits generative AI?
> In a bold stroke, the EU’s amended AI Act would ban American companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models. The amended act, voted out of committee on Thursday, would sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub, if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe. While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative systems.
There's an early ish phase in drafting legislation: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...
The NYT article behind your HN link doesn't seem to contain the quoted claim (maybe it was revised?).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral-class_amphibious_ass...
I think AI's going to be the same way, at least at first. Long-term there's of course a possibility of takeoff, slow or fast; I don't think we've excluded that yet.
Being ahead of the game has made me some money already. When Bard made a mistake, google stock dropped 10%. I bought knowing that LLMs make mistakes.
So I made $200.
You filthy \w slighty soiled speculator. Another six orders of magnitude, and you'll be worse than Soros.
from bubble to bubble. the crypto is bust, now it's time for AI to get swelling.... eventually it will pop too
Its that, or I DIY my product.
Either sounds fine to be honest.
All thanks to the continued unjustified and extreme seed funding rounds and over-valued companies like this especially with no product or any proof other than 'the team'.
They still enable me to walk into any major city and have a nice office to work out of and I appreciate them for that. They changed the real estate game for startups and solopreneurs and should be commended for this!
This AI Boom Will Bust | The Slope of Enlightenment is Coming
https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/this-ai-boom-will-bu...
'In the end today’s AI boom is an evolution. It evolves from the huge databases built by the Cloud Czars, from the technology used to search those data stores, and from the ability of Graphics Processing Units to turn out results quickly.'
The French like to go in early in tech, minitel is a good example, but they almost invariably get leapfrogged by subsequent waves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
In the AI era who owns the data and data sanctity is an upcoming legal quagmire that the big players will win. I don't see France ever being a big player in this world.
For some reason French innovation doesn't spread much beyond France. Concorde (I love that plane so much) was an Anglo French project. A lot of my friends parents in the UK midlands were involved with at massive project, but it never scaled to fleets and eventually withered away after an astonishing amount was spent developing it in the '60s ($2.8 billion in that era's valuations).
Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen.
The biggest EU one is german (not french), it's SAP. At least two french ones are basically french militaro-industrial complex / fake-private actually state-owned ones, being "big" by virtue of sucking french taxpayers money.
I don't know what France's culture is (although I'm a native french speaker and typing this from France) but "producing tech unicorns" certainly ain't part of it.
Also, a nations economy doesn't depend on the number of VC backrd tech unicorns. That France economy has quite some issues ain't news, the perceived lack of tech unicorns (if there ever was a pseudo-SV centric view of things, that's a front runner), is none of them.
Also, the US Navy is buying a French/Italian frigate design to replace, sorry, I meant support the littoral combat ships that don't work. The only reason Australia cancelled the contract for French is that, all of a sudden, they got nuclear ones.
I can categorically say I'm a productive ChatGPT user as of today. This might not apply to every industry, but for developing/refactoring there is already a GDP-boost with ChatGPT's name on it. Come to think of it, the AI hype-cycle has been in effect for some time already no? Maybe this is the productivity stage...
Really? I asked ChatGPT to code review my code and it halucinated issues that did not exist.
I also had the idea to give it 100 lines of code to refactor but after I got the response I realized that will can't trust that it did not fucked up so I decided to do the cleanup myself.
I can use it as a faster Google search to answer me soem questions, but I need to always check the answers.
When this open LLM could run on my local machine, I could at least use them to find stuff for me, I work on a big old project, I know there is soem functin or code that does X somewhere but I no longer remember th e files or function names. So a smarter search would be helpful.
Seems fair enough to me, if they had a barely trained prototype it probably would have been 113M for 15%.
Google is already feeling the threat to their $100 Billion/year business and is willing to throw massive amounts of money at AI.
OpenAI isn’t so much a startup but should be seen as Microsoft’s strategic vision and as such has all the Microsoft resources to push it forward. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing for years in vain hoping to cut into Google’s search dominance. Now comes the chance to use AI to outcompete Google and they will pour their resources into it.
With neural networks, massive amounts of data tend to overwhelm any secret sauce. Google and Microsoft have access to massive amounts of data as well as the hardware required to process these massive amounts of data to train neural networks
I see this as mostly a way for a European company to ride the hype wave of AI, combine that with European paranoia and envy with regards to the US and make a lot of their investors rich.
This company is dead before it got started. With the AI Act looming over it in the future even more so.
But maybe they will survive, by going to the USA.
EU has a lot of small-medium companies in both AI and cloud and they are doing just fine. If anything, they are better at adapting to regulations compared to, say, openAI...