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Comment by z7 | Hacker News Reader

Mistral has a lot of potential, but there's the obvious risk that without proper monetization strategies it might not achieve sustainable profitability in the long term.

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The French have a urge to be independent, the French government will hand them some juicy contract as soon as the can provide any product that justifies that.

Yeah they shouldn't worry, they'll get a big French government deal at worst

One of the French tycoons will eventually buy them.

> The French have a urge to be independent

They lose that fight a long time ago though. It seems they don't even try to pretend anymore.

I would say most European countries have that desire. That and the fact it can easily by fine tuned to the local language could make these models very popular outside the US.

I was wondering this. What is their business model exactly? Almost seems like Europe’s attempt to say “hey, look, we are relevant too”

Being acquired.

They charge for the API, like OpenAI.

https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/

Coupled with the concern that once you’re charging users money for a product, you are also liable for sketchy things they do with it. Not so much when you post a torrent link on twitter that happens to have model weights.

On their pitch deck it said they will monetise serving of their models.

While it may feel like a low moat if anyone can spin up a cloud instance with the same model, it's still a reasonable starting point. I think they will also be getting a lot of EU clients who can't/don't want to use US providers.

People forget the released version is v0.1

If the commerically-served model has improved capability and is exclusive to Mistral's service, there is a possible moat there.

they seem pretty committed to open-source AI (from interviews I've heard with the founders) - but maybe if they manage to train models with truly amazing capabilities somewhere down the line, they will keep some closed source

Nothing stops them from launching a chat app.

The old open source, but we'll host it for you? I think Bezos is going to be in fits of evil laughter about that model in 5 years, as all the open source compute moves to the clouds, with dollars flowing his way.

But one thing Mistral could do is have a free foundational model, and have non-free (as in beer, as in speech) "pro" models. I think they will have to.

Release small, open, foundational models.

Deploy larger, fine tuned variants and charge for them.

There’s a reason we don’t have the data set or original training scripts for mistral

it’s a “mistry” ;)

Here's to hoping such models run on dedicated chips locally, on Phones and PCs etc...

They already do, we just released a model equivalent to most 40-60b base models that runs on a MacBook Air no problem.

It's like 1.6gb, ones coming are better and smaller https://x.com/EMostaque/status/1732912442282312099?s=20

I think the large language model paradigm is pretty much done as we move to satisficing tbh

There are huge economy of scale benefits from providing hosted models.

I've been trying out all sorts of open models, and some of them are really impressive - but for my deployed web apps I'm currently sticking with OpenAI, because the performance and price I get from their API is generally much better than I can get for open models.

If Mistral offered a hosted version which didn't have any spin-up time and was price competitive with OpenAI I would be much more likely to build against their models.

This only is defensible for closed models though.

Zero moat. Everybody's doing it.

I suppose they could be the Google to everyone else's Yahoo and Dogpile, but I expect that to be a hard game to play these days.

At this valuation and given the strength of the team, it’s not hard to imagine a future acquisition yielding a significant ROI.

Besides, we don’t know what future opportunities will unfold for these technologies. Clearly there’s no shortage of smart investors happy to place bets on that uncertainty.

Model-as-a-service should work just fine.

Wait what? If company don’t make $ it don’t survive?

HN could really elevate the discourse if they flagged the submarine ads of VCs

It is a relevant question in the AI industry specifically due to new concerns about ROI given the intense compute costs.

Same concern I have regarding Spotify. [Which seems to have insane recurring costs. Plus some risky expansive strategic moves]

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