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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.

Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".

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Mistral is doing one more thing: building up local know-how in the European ecosystem. This is worth more than money, you can't bootstrap an industry overnight.

There are a bunch of Europeans working in the top labs abroad. We do not lack any know how, we only lack the raw amount of capital invested in doing private research, since our companies cannot thrive and compete globally due to regulations. Mistral would be much bigger if it was founded in the US.

Or it would be gone. Or it would be in the hands of psychopaths. Europe trades off the extremes for a better middle. It doesn't produce quite as many big names, but US and EU economies are roughly the same size.

Europe does have 150-200 million more people right?

just barely over a 100M more

Wikipedia says 745 million… that can’t be right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe

So even worse

Does that include Russia, the Asian country with a European Capital?

Population-weighted, the country is more European (80% of pop on Europe side). That 80% counts towards population of Europe.

EU != Europe...

According to wikipedia, EU has a 23 trillion GDP (30 trillion PPP) and 451 million people, making ~51k GDP per person (67k PPP). US is at 32 trillion GDP and same PPP for 342 million people - 94k per person

Ah, interesting I always thought USA’s GDP far ahead, but it’s not. Compared to EU it’s 20 vs. 30 trillions/y. Adding Switzerland, UK, etc. and it’s close.

PPP the EU is also about 30 trillions, which is probably the better measure since we're comparing production for domestic purposes.

The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".

Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.

> Apple is probably also waiting

they could seriously do something about it instead of waiting.

Why?

Whatever they do will take 2 to 4 years and I think they will do something to permanently solve their memory problem and I think it will be no different than solving their processor problem (Intel) or their long-term modem problem (Qualcomm).

Let Google spend $185 billion, and Microsoft spend $140 billion thru the end of this year on AI model building and AI hardware.

Is that really part of Apple’s strategy? They have recent examples of moving a whole bunch of stuff that requires a lot of research in-house. You’ve got stuff like their silicon, cellular modems, Vision Pro, the health business, etc.

Really Apple is pretty R&D heavy when it comes to their hardware business.

I think it’s more accurate to say that Apple sees itself as a consumer solutions provider first while a lot of the companies in the AI race are heavily focused on B2B.

The frontier AI model race is about being the first to be able to sell solutions to companies that will replace their workers and make their workers more productive.

But for B2C, the value potential just isn’t there, which is why Apple isn’t chasing it.

And now you’ve got the Mac mini/Mac Studio situation where Apple is better off selling pickaxes.

> go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights

If you know Apple's history, this should stand out to you.

> "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights"

Straight out of "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.

Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?

I think the route to profitability is super clear and simple. To be a reasonable alternative to Chinese and US models.

I think you're probably better off using the Chinese open models right now if you're concerned about vendor lock-in or capabilities disappearing because someone's economy seems a bit fragile atm. There's no guarantee China keeps releasing open weights though, so supporting a pragmatic alternative isn't a horrible idea.

I don't think any Mistral model can match an open 30B-sized Qwen from a year ago, so right now they're not really a competitive alternative to anything at all. Except Voxtral perhaps, but that's very niche.

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