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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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