My theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral just doesn’t have access to this level of compute or the money to try and muscle their way in.
Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support?
Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.
I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)
I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.
So, more than 70% of the compute on earth?
More than 5%, I assume. From the combination of "5% in the EU under European companies" and "each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU"
I dont't think that was meant to be implied: the EU actually has access to more GPUs than those hosted by European companies in Europe, just as US labs have access to GPUs hosted outside the US
They can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays.
Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.
The chinese labs manage to do it. Mistral should have enough money.
The EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanisms
It's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support
China is a way more corrupt country but this might be a benefit of less rules.
[flagged]
You think they're intentionally being bad because they can't manage to pump $65B into a startup on a whim...?
You think well over a year after making grandiose on the record claims is “on a whim”?
What claims are you talking about?
I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.
[flagged]
No, we want you to backup your claims and provide sources or stop adding pointless low effort anti-EU noise to the conversation. It's frustrating, any time there's any kind of discussion about anything European on HN it gets flooded with shallow, low effort "EU-bad" posts like your contributions here.
If you're going to make that claim at least put some effort in.
This is a mostly American forum and some people want to piss on the EU to elevate themselves. Europeans do the same to the US but about politics, health care, work life balance, and quality of life. You know, the stuff that matters :D
From what I can see you put in zero effort in a response and you expect me to put in more effort?
I already checked for one variation of a google search like I said.
Can you show some proof you did anything at all?
Or maybe they’re just poor.
It's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.
And a lot of the "funding" is through mutual deals with MSFT, Nvidia, etc. The Europeans have none of that and would need to pay in actual cash.