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Comment by mnewme | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit. The AI Act is not the problem, Mistral models are definitely usable and some were/are competitive.

European future looks bright compared to the political landscape the US has now

Political landscape of the US right now will change in few years like it has been changing for the last 250 years. USA does not equate to its current political situation. But EU would keep on rotting from inside and I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

There will always be a place for domestically sourced AI I think. Even if Mistral models suck theyll get enough defense revenue that they wont go out of business

Sums up EU in a nutshell, if it cannot compete in the open market, fund it by tax payers money (defence budgets are funded by tax payers money)

I mean US is doing the same thing with intel so not like this is EU exclusive

You cannot be seriously comparing Mistral to Intel. Intel might be falling behind right now, but they were pioneers in 90s and 2000s. When has Mistral ever been a pioneer on anything?

Actually at MoE. Though Deepseek took that approach and improved it by a lot.

They do in many other areas. Look at ASML or look at chemicals

It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?

it is a reasonable claim. Trump would be gone in few years and the constitution guarantees it. What does EU has? more bureaucrats? EU doesn't even has a constitution and yet it interfere with the politics of sovereign nations till they bend the knee to Brussels

There is a constant change in politicians and parties and views among people (hello 2022!) about policy topics inside the EU all the time. Do you seriously think politics in the EU stays the same?

It absolutely has. It's always more regulation, more bureaucracy and more red tapes. They are just creating more barriers to keep themselves employed and to expand the reach of their authority.

Actually right now the reverse is happening. GDPR will become easier there is simplification coming, there will be less national goldplating

They have been discussing that for years, but still nothing happened. At the rate of the bureaucracy it would take few more years to even draft the laws to ease GDPR

You are not up to date, this is already in legislation process and needs the vote of the parlaiment, highly likely it will come. There is also a simplification package and a migration pact. A lot is happening right now

Can you share your sources please? When is the vote scheduled?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/package-dig...

> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.

It could be true that French government might use it, but I hardly think Germans or Italians or any other government would trust Mistral or use it. Even though they are part of EU, they still don’t trust each other completely when it comes to national security and sharing intelligence. I can easily imagine BND fine tuning some Chinese model or still relying on American models

Do you think that companies and States will use "usable" models from Mistral (who has left the race anyway), or frontiers/near frontier ? It's akin to say that walking a good enough means of transportation and we don't need anything else. One day the guys in charriots will remind you of the dire reality.

I am not denying Mistral is not top tier anymore, (except OCR and STT for speed/efficency) just that the AI Act is not the reason they are not.

But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge.

And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

> And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.

Yes but you can make the reverse argument as well: many US companies have offices in Europe and often their research departments.

This whole US vs Europe discussions are fruitless anyways

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