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Comment by armarr | Hacker News Reader

Do they really need to be anything more than the best European option to be successful?

Are they the best European option, though? I haven't checked, but surely there's at least a few services hosted in the EU offering DeepSeek etc inference.

I'm pretty sure Europe doesn't want to cede AI development entirely to China.

Don't get me wrong, I do wish Mistral's models were competitive with the Chinese ones. But right now, they simply aren't, and might never be in the future.

If you want the best option available while keeping your data within the EU, running a Chinese open weights model on hardware within the EU is likely the way to go.

Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?

Not even coding, in most stuff, Mistral models are as embarrassing as LLaMa, because they’re actually just LLaMa

That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.

Enshittification and Political BS has already happened to Mistral

Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.

Europe has ceded development of all tech to China and the US, I don’t see why AI should be any different.

Because it did doesn't mean it still wants to.

And Europe is now waking up to that. The people have access to YouTube and caught up on what's been going in European industries. Entering a multi polar world they are at least now informed.

Edit: related, France had many of these commissions to report on the dismantling of it's industrial fabric: https://youtu.be/1OH5PqO_O1Q

Has it though? Last time I checked EU still is the worlds main producer of semiconductor lithography - which is arguably the basis for all tech worldwide

It hasn't. Multipolar world, expertise exists everywhere.

But user-facing innovation is coming from the US. No EU Apple, Google, Amazon. And infrastructure R&D in China is unprecedented. They are reaping a multi-decadal investment in higher education.

The US has infinite VC money, a hypercompetitive environment that rewards first-movers, an appetite for letting these first-movers reap the benefits of their monopoly, and a political class that aligns with business interests. China has a coherent STEM education story and protections/state support for key industries. The EU sits at an awkward inbetween spot. It's raison d'etre is enabling free markets, and consequently it doesn't allow national champions and strong industrial politics. But it also doesn't have the same hypercompetitive culture as the US, and it's political class is less aligned with business interests.

The thing is, I don't really want the EU to compete with China and the US on these issues. If you have one system that makes people happy, but where eggs cost 1.20€ and iPhones have a smaller screen resolution, and one where people are miserable but eggs cost 1.10€ and iPhones have a higher screen resolution, then in a free market the system that makes people miserable wins.

I believe there are hard questions, no easy answers, and the EU, being a consensus mechanism for national states that hold the power, is not the best institutional set-up to tackle them.

"a political class that aligns with business interests" - or is it the other way around, more recently? - Big tech firms bowing to Trump and all that.

The EU is mostly a hotspot for leisure, tourism, food, fashion.

A lot of people enjoy living there, meaning there is necessarily some local talent that doesn't get captured by the global markets.

China, Japan and USA all have their chip machines, just ASML is making the most advanced ones.

When you talk about China, you may have confused development with production.

I think that's a very valid question.

Most German "Mittelstand" I have encountered, that are generally on the more conservative side when it comes to data privacy are still fine with leaning on e.g. Azure with OpenAI models.

Only when you move towards really high security and governmental organizations is when Mistral is usually being brought up as an option.

That's EU hosted but not EU trained

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