Hacker News Reader

Comment by fvv | Hacker News Reader

given new USA ai diffusion rules will mistral be able to survive and attract new capitals ? , I mean, given that france is top tier country

View on HN

This sounds like a USA problem, rather than a Mistral problem.

Not being able to attract capital would clearly be a Mistral problem.

Luckily for Mistral, capital also exists in countries other than the USA.

What are these ai diffusion rules?

"Those destinations, which are listed in paragraph (a) to Supplement No. 5 to Part 740, are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For these destinations, this IFR makes minimal changes: companies in these destinations generally will be able to obtain the most advanced ICs without a license as long as they certify compliance with specific requirements provided in § 740.27." [0]

France seems clearly exempt from most of the requirements. The main requirement of 740.27 is to sign a license under U.S. law, under which customers are prohibited from re-exporting ICs to non-Third 1 countries without U.S. approval.

What's more, the text refers to AIs, which can have dual uses. The concept of dual civil-military use concerns a large number of technologies, and dates back to the first nuclear technologies.

The text gives a few examples of dual-use models, such as models that simulate or facilitate the production of chemical compounds that could be used for chemical weapon creation, non conventional weapon creation or that could simplify or replace already identified dual-use goods or technologies.

These uses are already covered by existing legislation on dual-use goods, and US export control. The American legislator is therefore potentially thinking of other uses, such as satellite and radar image analysis, and electronic warfare.

As France is a nuclear-armed country with its own version of thoses technologies, it makes little sense to place it under embargo.

But France isn't going to like being obliged once again to be forced to apply American law and regulation on its soil.

As a European, I hope that alternatives to American dependence will soon appear.

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/15/2025-00...

Thanks, very interesting information. I was aware of IC rules, but have never heard about limitations on model weights.

Export restrictions on US models seem like a boon for French Mistral, not a problem.

Even if for now France is strong-armed into applying the same restrictions, they will be in a much better position than US companies if US-Europe relations deteriorate. Something that's not entirely unlikely under Trump. We are a week into his presidency and France is already talking about deploying troops to Greenland

In the case of Mistral, the restrictions on exporting the model would not apply, since the model is produced in France. What's more, Mistral won't be much help in producing deadly gases or uranium enrichment facilities. It is therefore not subject to this legislation for these two reasons.

On the other hand, ICs could be subject to restrictions, and France has no alternative for sourcing large-capacity ICs.

The USA could use dollar-denominated transactions to broaden the scope of the text. It's not insurmountable, but it will complicate matters.

Actually, Mistral by virtue of not aligning/safety lobotomizing their models will indeed trivially "help in producing deadly gases or uranium enrichment facilities!"

It's quite a feat to demonstrate that you know nothing about LLMs, chemistry or the nuclear industry in so few characters.

Let's see your google scholar or huggingface profile. You better square up if you're going to talk shit.

It's telling that the release from OpenAI today warns about exactly this threat in their lengthy security section: https://cdn.openai.com/o3-mini-system-card.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com