They just released weights, and being a for profit, need to optimize for making money, not eyeballs. It seems wise to guide people to the API offering.
Github Copilot makes +100M/year, if not way way more.
Having a VS Code extension for Mistral would be a revenue stream if it was one-click and better or cheaper than Github Copilot. It is malpractice in my mind to not be doing this if you are investing in creating coding models.
I assumed they meant free x local. It doesn't seem rational to make this one paid: its significantly smaller than their better model, and even more so than Copilot's.
plus they’ve got some kinda enterprise/team offering; assuming they charge extra there, I could easily see $100M ARR
but that’s pure conjecture, and generous at that; I don’t think we have any hard numbers
Would it help signal competency? They're a small team focused on making models, not VS Code extensions.
Would they do M&A? The founding team is ex-Googlers and has found significant attention in the MBA world via being an EU champion.
Half-baked idea that obviously the models would need to be tuned for different languages / for specific knowledge, therefore countries would pay to do that.
There were many ideas like that, none of them panned out, hence the defenestration. All love for the guy, he did a very, very good thing. It's just meaningless to invoke it here, not only because it's completely off-topic, if anything that's already the play as the EU champion, and because the Stability gentleman was just thinking out loud, nothing more.
If your country believes guns=bad nipples=good war=hell but you get your novels and history books written by an LLM trained by people who believe guns=good nipples=bad war=heroic it would be naive to expect the output to reflect your values and not theirs.
Even close allies of the US would be nervous to have such power in the hands of American multinational corporations alone - so the French state could be very eager for Mistral to produce a competitive product.