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Comment by kimsant | Hacker News Reader

AI agents will become a comodity.

Europeans not wanting to be dependent, and they are giving for free what US investors planed to charge with 90% margin.

Amazing! What a blast. Thank you for your service (this first 100M$ burned to POC GPT1 and from here, we are so good to go)

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The problem with the European independence story is, that it seems Mistral runs its own stuff also on US cloud act affected infrastructure. This makes them a very weird value proposition: If I accept a level of "independence" whereby I run on AWS or Azure, I could as well pay for Anthropic or GPT to have SOTA performance.

If I do not accept that level of independence but want more, I need to buy what's on OVH, Scaleway, Ionos etc. or host my own, but that usually means even smaller, worse models or a lot of investment.

Nevertheless, the "band" that Mistral occupies for economic success is very narrow. Basically just people who need independence "on paper" but not really. Because if I'm searching for actual independence, there's no way I could give them money at the moment for one of their products and it making sense, cause none of their plans are an actual independence-improvement over, let's say, Amazon Bedrock.

I really really want to support them, but it must make economic sense for my company, too, and it doesn't.

I don’t care about the servers, they are a comodity already.

The key is to avoid chantage, remember Oracle with DBs, people learned not to build on top of unreplaceable stuff

They are building their own infra - south of Paris and another one was announced in Sweden recently.

Then why does their list of subprocessors list Google and Microsoft "for cloud infrastructure", specifically for "Le Chat, La Plateforme, Mistral Code"? Sounds to me as if they're mainly running on Azure.

Also, they're listing CoreWeave as inference provider in "EEA" area, but CoreWeave is of course also an US company. Even if they have their data center physically in the EU, it must be considered open access for the USA due to the CLOUD act.

https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors

If what you say is true, they have a communications problem and they need to fix that urgently. Right now, this is why they don't get my business. Others will have made the same decision based on their own subprocessor list.

Or did you mean, they're like, right now building it and plan to move there, but it's not up yet?

They are not up yet. The Paris one is expected in 2028, the one in Sweden in 2027.

I really hope you're right. Sadly, though, I don't see any evidence of UK companies disinvesting from big US tech. There aren't good alternatives and what there is is too complex. As long as 'everyone else is still using MS', it seems like it's a brave CTO that switches to European providers. Unless that happens, the network effect of having AI+data is likely to mean US tech still has a big advantage in corp settings. But, HN - please tell me I'm wrong!

I wonder what the biggest (non-AI) moats are for US tech against the alternatives?

> There aren't good alternatives and what there is is too complex.

Sounds like a worth challenge for this community, mind giving actual examples and see what others can suggest?

Vertical integration and breadth and depth of offerings on the cloud and customer lock-in from dominating it for 20 years

they will, but the jagged frontier is fractal and each one will have different capabilities; you'll want to mix models and to get best results consistently you'll need to.

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