how does this work in their favor as a business? Don't get me wrong I love how all of it's free, but that doesn't seem to be helpful towards a $2b valuation. At least WeWork charged for access
Consider Mistral like a proto-Airbus.
The most famous one is Xavier Niel, who started Free/Iliad a French ISP/cloud provider and later cellphone provider that literally decimated the pricing structure of the incumbent some 20 years ago in France and still managed to make money. He’s a bit of a tech folk hero, kind of like Elon Musk was before Twitter. His company Iliad is also involved in providing access to NVIDIA compute clusters to local AI startups, playing the role Microsoft Azure plays for OpenAI.
France and the EU at large has missed the boat on tech, but they have a card to play here since they have for once both the expertise and the money rolled up. My main worry is that the EU legislation that’s in the works will be so dumb that only big US corporations will be able to work it out, and basically the legislation will scare investment away from the EU. But since the French government is involved and the guy who is writing the awful AI law is a French nominee, there’s a bit of hope.
In a strange way it's almost akin to how soviet propaganda in the cold war played a role in spurring on the civil rights movement in the states.
* Maybe in the future, bigger closed models? Make money with the state-of-art of what you can provide.
The first step is probably gaining mindshare with free, open source models, and then they can extend into model training services, consultation for ML model construction, and paid access to proprietary models, similar to OpenAI.
In trends people pay for a seat at the table with a good team and worry about the details later. The 2B headline number is a distraction.
It also solidifies their name as the best, above all others. That's extremely important mindshare. You need mindshare at the foundation to build a billion dollar revenue startup.
Most business will want their models trained in their own, internal data, instead of risking uploading their Intellectual Property into SaaS solutions. These Open Source models could fill that gap.