Mistral AI acquires Emmi AI
emmi.ai
emmi.ai
"...a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio as well as research, development and operations..."
ASML is one of the clients Mistral keeps referencing, for example here: https://mistral.ai/news/forge But it isn't clear exactly what they've been doing together. The Forge page only mentions they "train models on the proprietary data that powers their most complex systems and future-defining technologies."
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerat...
ASML’s EUV money printer has nothing to do with their ability to deploy that money in illiquid investments instead of to their own shareholders
ASML buying equity in one company in tangentially related industry (just because they’re in Europe and the pickings are slim in both offerings and growth capital) has nothing to do with any synergy or integration with ASML’s utility (and bottleneck) to the chip supply chain
remember when you were studying for standardized tests as a teenager? this is what the high scoring answer would be
Somehow people are only upset when Europeans dare to do the same.
and this is a symptom
There’s nothing to say when the party does an investment thats their system they have total control in a state capitalist society that raised their population on marxism
And the US ecosystem is diverse to have relevant purpose built vehicles doing private investments, in conjunction with various public market operations by the state
What I am curious about is what has Emmi actually built? Who uses it? I was hoping to see something like a demo on the website but couldn’t find anything concrete.
They did injection molding for example, and I'm sure they're testing similar approach to everything which can be modeled by PDEs, which is well pretty much everything ever of engineering interest (I'm assuming this is somehow connected to a research project funded by Engel, one of the leading injection molding machine companies, located in the same Region): https://www.emmi.ai/models/neuralmould
Mold flow simulators already exist, but they're slow. So if you're a mold engineer, and you want to try different material properties, each run takes time.
By making this into a transformer (no idea what that model looks like) it can run pretty fast, because it's not mathematically solving it, it's running a learned function approximator. So for the mold engineer, suddenly they can just change values around and get pretty fast analysis.
They appear to not be selling it as a product per se, but partnered with a German company called Simcon to sell it, whose website lists it as a preview, so it's unclear how good it is compared to conventional simulations.
If their best cloud-run offering is far more intelligent than the laptop Gemma / Qwen than nevermind
This is why Elon’s appealing. I thought they surely had the talent to be considered a fourth at this point. (Oh someone mentioned they’re politically unpopular at work.)
Mistral is super welcome competition, good luck!
Only desperate people would go work for Elon at this point.
But that's just my best guess, and I'm saying this as one who migrated here rather than growing up here. I've also actually noticed the literal anarchists here, whereas the ones in the UK I only knew once they told me, before anyone makes a planet-of-hats kind of mistake on this.
It is done, but by very few. And the EU has made progress on uniformizing and simplifying it, but it seems to have done more progress on the B2B side than on B2C.
While the US is a much bigger consumer market than any single EU country, with significant differences in disposable income and spending power. 18% to 20% of full-time workers in the US make over $100.000. That's nearly half the entire population of France. A third that of Germany.
And even if there are differences and administrative hurdles when selling across US states borders, that road has mostly (or seems to have, from here) been paved.
Put these two together and a freelancer becomes an interesting proposition for some tasks. In Germany I could bill roughly 2.5x my after-tax salary. You also incur no other costs such as equipment and illness-as—a-loss. And… you’re really easy to fire when COVID comes around.
I think it's more complicated. Anthropic has been focused on enterprise for a long time, and OpenAI seems to be doubling down as well.
I am so tired of M&A. Buy instead of competing or - heaven forfend - cooperating.
Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air, and Europe will have lean and clean infra to support just what's needed.
In certain domains there are no ceilings to return on compute. For example, offensive/defensive cybersecurity, it will be an arms race of who has more compute to patch up against more sophisticated attacks, and who runs more sophisticated attacks
>Americans will get to enjoy their rusty infrastructure and polluted air,
America has very high air quality and fairly good infrastructure given their population density.
LLMs on the other hand have only been around for a few years. Large technological breakthroughs are much more likely.
In addition, I don't think the future is billions of people chatting with ChatGPT all day. LLMs can write deterministic code for many things, and in the end, we only need their "intelligence" and brittleness in relatively few scenarios. So, with good optimization, we shouldn't need so many huge data centers.
On the topic of clean air, the US is relatively spared at the moment because past governments were more reasonable. But just wait a couple of years under the current leadership and you'll see. Just from this morning, look at the top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214017
Commercialisation of research is still hard in comparison to the USA, though.
The present situation must be seen as a sort of "keep alive" state, where we do something unsustainable until we can achieve takeoff, but we can only actually start up for real once we start making the machines we need.
If NVIDIA's margins were 20% or something, this wouldn't be the case, but they aren't.
European regulations help protect from USA's tech monopolies. French labor laws and social security and state-funded scientific schools helped build one of the most competent international AI scientist generation.
All of europe got crushed by the US on the domain of internet. "Regulated" or not.
Could you please elaborate what labour law drives the labour out of france?
Building a company in france and europe is hell even mistral ceo said this a few days ago in front of french officials
In top of high taxes, there is a very adversarial administration and a philosophy of “I’ve told you, you should never have started this project”.
In the baltics it is easy for example, but your experience can vary a lot depending on the country as the EU business environment is not uniform.
The impacts of French labor law have been studied. The European Union is a natural laboratory for the impacts of labor policy. There is a strong correlation between looser requirements for terminating employees and startup formation and risk-taking in business. The Nordics and the Baltics have produced more successful technology firms than countries where dismissing employees is onerous.
The impact of labor laws in France is profound. To avoid hiring employees, many firms bring people on short-term contracts. This disproportionately impacts young people. A tradeoff of the risk of being unable to discharge employees is reduced salaries for the gainfully employed. I have met several French people in tech who left because their post-tax compensation was so low relative to employment in the United States.
This information is unsourced and parroted from various articles in The Economist, Money & Macro podcast, and accounts of European citizens I've known.
By having a diverse set of private pension funds and endowments as LPs this is what funds the VC ecosystem.
France vacuums up its private capital into government pension schemes and dumps it into low yielding government bonds.
And if you look at mistral biggest customers it would be lying not to say they are done through political ties. No shame in saying that. US gov and agencies created FAANG through those same mecanism
It may just be greenwashing to check “AI sovereignty” off the list.
[1] Outdated by now (higher)?