Mistral raises a $640M Series B led by General Catalyst at a $6B valuation

Perhaps I'm missing something but what's the usp of Mistral, as far as I can see their models aren't competitive?

The USP is the same as Rheinmetall and Thales, juicy government contracts since they are "European" and important for "Sovereignty".

There's already talk about nationalizing large models and clusters Manhattan project style.

But even taking that with a very large grain of salt, doesn't it seem like a no-brainer to want to incentivize at least some LLM development to happen in Europe as well?

Alternative source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/mistral_ai_funding/

Discussion [0] (111 points, yesterday, 60 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651298