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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Mistral is just chasing around sort of "the fringes" of what could be useful AI features. Are they just getting out-classed by OAI, Google, Anthropic?

It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are.

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Form processing is vastly more useful than meme generation. When people need to do real work this is the sort of tool they are going to reach for.

Yep. I saw the title and got excited.... this is a particular problem area where I think these things can be very effective. There are so many data entry class tasks which don't require huge knowledge or judgement... just clear parsing and putting that into a more machine digestible form.

I don't know... feels like this sort of area, while not nearly so sexy as video production or coding or (etc.)... but seems like reaching a better-than-human performance level should be easier for these kinds of workloads.

Following the leaders too closely seems like a bad move, at least until a profitable business model for an AI model training company is discovered. Mistral’s models are pretty good, right? I mean they don’t have all the scaffolding around them that something like chatGPT does, but building all that scaffolding could be wasted effort until a profitable business model is shown.

Until then, they seem to be able to keep enough talent in the EU to train reasonably good models. The kernel is there, which seems like the attainable goal.

>Mistral’s models are pretty good, right

Are they? IIRC their best model is still worse than the gpt-oss-120B?

Devstral 2 should be above https://mistral.ai/news/devstral-2-vibe-cli

Though I haven't checked other benchmarks and they only report swe

Devstral 2 is free from the API. That has to be a bigger point to what makes it better. The price to performance ratio is practically better in every way. Does it matter if the performance is slightly worse when it is practically free?

Yes, but if it's actually competitive that won't last that long. Mistral will do the same as google (cut their free tier by 50x or so) if they ever catch up. Financially anything else would make no sense.

Of course currently Mistral has an insane free tier, 1 billion tokens for each(?) of their models per month.

Calling it oss is a farce

They can't hire the best talent because the most experienced people will not leave their homes to chase a high-risk role with questionable remuneration by relocating their whole life to Paris or London.

This goes to show how leaders in Mistral don't quite get that they are not special as they seem to think they are. Anthropic or OpenAI also require their talent to relocate but with stakes that are at least a high reward - $500k or $1M a year is a good start that is maybe worth investing into.

If somebody is in the EU already that calculation completely flips. We have a strong software startup industry in the US, would it really be that surprising if there was more unallocated talent in the EU, at this point?

> If somebody is in the EU already that calculation completely flips.

Would you find it compelling to move your whole life for ~100k EUR when you can make as much or more at your home city, with a job that is almost certainly more stable?

And I meant the Europeans. People in EU don't have a culture of moving between cities or countries unless they really have a strong reason to, e.g. can't find a job at home.

> would it really be that surprising if there was more unallocated talent in the EU, at this point?

I am pretty sure there is. It has changed over the course of last few years, primarily because of COVID, and companies willing to offer remote contracts, but it's far from being able to utilize the talent.

> People in EU don't have a culture of moving between cities or countries

Southern and Eastern Europeans certainly do.

I said unless they have a strong reason to. Do they?

Do people in other places constantly move to other states/countries on a whim without any strong reasons?

> They can't hire the best talent because the most experienced people will not leave their homes to chase a high-risk role with questionable remuneration by relocating their whole life to Paris or London.

The best talents have been regularly leaving Paris and London, India and China for decades. With the US closing its borders, they definitely have a chance to lure some.

Mistral is pursuing pursuing B2B use cases. Thats because they're releasing open models and the big thing about B2B is they HATE sending their data off-prem. OCR'ing and organizing old docs is a huge feature in B2B. Mistral's strategy seems smart to me.

Why did they make this model only available though their API then?

That is a good question, I don't know.

> It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are

The EU is extremely invested in Mistral's development: half of the effort is finding ways to tax them (hello Zucman tax), the other half is wondering how to regulate them (hello AI act)

Zucman taxes rich individuals (100m€+), not Mistral. AI Act rules are not that difficult to comply with by GPAI model providers as long as the model doesn't become systemic risk... They have to spend a lot more time on PR and handshaking with French politicians than on AI compliance. They probably don't even have a single FTE for that... So that's just prejudice I believe.

We're too busy with real life to bother with generating SVGs of pelicans on bicycles sorry, but feel free to dump billions on chatbots

I think there is a lot of broad support, but they're just kind of hamstrung by EU regulation on AI development at this stage. I think the end game will ultimately be getting acquired by an American company, and then relocating.

I hope the EU blocks any acquisitions by American companies. The west needs to start protecting its strategic assets.

Do you have any source on this other than vibes based on”EU bad” sentiment?

I guess it's better to do the same stuff everyone else is doing?

>It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested

Maybe, i think it will be to our benefit when the bubble pops that we are not heavily invested, no harm investing a little.

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