Mistral raises €3B

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".

I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.

It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.

From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?

I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.

Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.

Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).

Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.

Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.

Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.

It's the same with gaming

When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"

Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".

Which is smart move

Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?

In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.

Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.

Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.

The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.

You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).

My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).

When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.

To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.

Not Mistral

They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy.

Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.

Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.

To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.

I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.

I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.

At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.

I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.

The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.

Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.

You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.

I’m not sure really what the winning strategy is in this weird arms race.

So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China.

Which would be the most European outcome ever.

This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.

I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.

I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.

Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.

> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing

So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.

That is absolutely not "do nothing".

You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.

When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.

Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.

Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal.

To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar jobs, it's uncommon for people to leave before 6PM and staying late is rewarded as high engagement.

Lastly, you might consider buying and renovating a house so you can escape this dilemma, but it isn't cheap: 2-bedroom (T3) around 700k euros, that represents 20 years of frugal savings on 90k gross.

Vacation, cheap and good healthcare, and unemployment benefits are great in France, but the current government has been eroding these social benefits, and those are not unique to France for well-paid tech workers anyway.

Maybe this appeal to mediocrity in a competitive market explains Mistral's mediocre performance.

I'm Australian. We have 4 weeks paid leave a year, comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage.

Most of my career I avoided taking leave, and I'd usually just get it paid out when I left. Who wants to take leave when you are doing the most interesting, most important thing you can imagine doing?

Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.

And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.

What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.

To not talk about the toxic environment that European companies generate in general. Ie: "you should be grateful you have this job".

Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.

Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.

Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.

At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.

Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.

Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)

Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.

Culture.

In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.

Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.

a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.

The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.

Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.

This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.

there is so such thing.

if there is it sure is very flexible and forgetful

That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.

What kind of attitude is that?