Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?
When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
The two companies have read the market the same.
It's always very dangerous for first movers and their investors, and the commodification of intelligence seems even more likely each time a chinese open model release. It's less exciting to do business that way, but if you're building to stand the test of time, it's wiser that way.
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".
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".
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?
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
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.
Mistral is a Sovereign LLM Company, it's their main product and has been from nearly the start.
They don't actually need to offer the best models, they need credibility on the tech front and the security/strategic front, and institutional clients will keep coming.
What’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?)
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.
"What does Mistral own?"
Independence from the USA's CLOUD Act, secret FISA courts, and ICC-style disabling of important services.*
*…and the Chinese equivalents.
Do they actually own it though? AFAIK they have no significant moat even in the EU (legal or competitive) and given the current accessibility to non-SOTA AI (open weight models and distillation) it's just a matter of time until Mistral gets serious competition on these points.
The wording of the CLOUD act prevents any American company from competing, but yes, other European-only companies could offer the same.
Apple and Mistral are not in the same market.
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.
They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading.
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.
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM.
Which is smart move
One is american, the other is european
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
> 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"
Microsoft got massive pushback when they did it, Sony even made ad making fun of it. Selective memory much ?
Well Microsoft’s PR machine is working overtime then because I wasn’t even aware of Microsoft doing this until this HN thread whereas Sony was everywhere on social media
One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.
Apple is a hardware company.
AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies
Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.
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".
I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.
They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts.
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.
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.
Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.
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.
I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently).
First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).
I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.
I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.
> once they're good enough for coding aid
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.
They are now serving GLM52 and the 15€ sub comes with a nice included quota. So I get good code assist and pay a EU company for it.
I don't care about benchmarks. Benchmarks show that Opus 5 is a stronger model than Fable 5 which is obviously not the case.
But I do care about capability and so far only Anthropic and, very recently with Astra, OpenAI can deliver on coding quality. And capability matters immensely. There is a world of difference between being able to do something and not being able.
People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.
A capability isn't binary. There is a massive difference between can produce an impressive demo and can reliably complete the task without a human babysitting it.
Yup, new SOTA models especially with high/xhigh/max reasoning too often overengineer solutions, good for benchmarks that usually measure task completion, bad for normal development where you don't want 'rewrite in rust and 1k LOC unit tests' style solutions when agent does mundane bug fixes.
When it comes to mundane bug fixes the value is in actually finding the cause of the bug, and I find SOTA models way outperform smaller ones here. I don't care about their output - I can write the correct 5 line patch myself once I understand what's wrong.
It's not this week's change. Fable was the step change for programming. And most of truly useful and powerful capabilities arrived in the last eight months.
> Fable was the step change for programming.
AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field. There are other use cases for LLMs beside coding. As Mistral AI wrote:
> During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the most powerful model. Organizations and governments are now asking a different one: how to harness the power of AI for their mission-critical needs without surrendering control over the infrastructure and intelligence loop. Demand for that combination of performance with control, choice and independence is growing internationally, as enterprises and governments weigh the long-term technology dependencies, data governance requirements and deployment choices that come with any AI investment.
> Mistral is the only AI company in the world building the full stack required to answer that question: open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production; ensuring that customers are never locked into a single vendor's roadmap, pricing or availability.
> Mistral’s full-stack and open approach also allows organizations to build on it without exposing their most valuable data, workflows and institutional knowledge to anyone outside their own walls. That's what makes Mistral’s stack the sovereign AI layer, meaning retaining control across four dimensions: data that stays inside the organization's boundaries, models that are controllable and customizable, compute that is private and predictable, and systems in production that are fully controllable and auditable.
>> Fable was the step change for programming > AFAIK: Mistral does not even try to compete in this field.
They have released models speficially for programming that ”vibe coding” would be safer.
https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral/
People said this for Opus 4.6 too. Every release the models get RLHF'ed into accomplishing a new task and the people who need to do this task think there was a step change.
To be fair Opus 4.6 was genuinely a really good model when it came out, in fact I'm not sure Opus 5 is even any better.
It's definitely a lot slower, though
Yeah that's kinda my point. I'm not sure if the models have gotten that much smarter, but they're certainly getting more capable. That's not the same thing though.
There are things GPT 6.0 can accomplish for me that 5.3 was not able to. But there are also things it still fails at, and it doesn't seem to be much better at the big picture. It does spam about 100x more tests though and I wonder if just RLHFing it to test everything constantly is carrying it more. 6.0 writes so many tests and spends so much time verifying it's work in python sandboxes. Slow as hell but it tends to get things right the first time more which is good, I guess. I don't love the thought of a 500loc feature adding +4000loc due to tests though.
Yep same with latest Claude models - code isn't really any better than Opus 4.5/4.6, but use 5x as many tokens doing random stuff that's mostly unnecessary.
And yeah still for some reason they often can't understand how to set up any project locally without handholding, which is something you'd think an LLM would actually be good at
If the choice is between Mistral and no AI, I'll take Mistral any day
Even those old llama models were ok for coding
Yes yes they won't be like Claude's fire and forget (until you see how many tokens you burned to write "Hello World")
> don't care about benchmarks
You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).
Genuinely interested, which ones do you think have relevance?
If I read forums and talk to people IRL most have differing opinions what model is best. Yes, for me it's pretty clear Opus is better than earlier models, but it's at least not obvious to me that the later are significant improvements.
They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.
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.
There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
Oh one hand sure, on the other, moving fast and breaking things is exactly where the customer ends up footing the bill or suffering damages.
Sure but it's not the government calling for regulation, it's Mistral. At times they seem like a government mouthpiece to check the waters, which I could accept if their models were at least any good
Didn't both Amodei and Altman called for regulation of open-weight models? Not that long ago on xitter....
They've both been insisting that humanity's survival is contingent on regulation since the start and employ armies of lobbyists to try to shape the policies they want that hold significant sway in their own country. But of course Americans doing this is smart and entrepreneurial...
Did you miss the Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts screeching for regulation?
Yes, now that they are in place they want to put barriers for new entrants.
Meh, OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same. The US shtick is "our models are too powerful, government, please hold them back (and buy 10% of the company)".
Edit: forgot, they also call for banning Chinese models and open weights models...
> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.
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.
Don't make me laugh. Who has actually sat in Congress and told congress leaders to push regulatory capture?
Not Mistral
This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.
Which provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?
It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.
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.
> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
And in the long run, regulated market companies win out- while the de-regulated ones decay and enshittify. Boeing vs Airbus comes to mind.
Great example. An highly regulated field (aerospace) put so many barriers of entry for startups and competition that the incumbents simple have to reason to innovate or even compete anymore.
I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
> I heard there used to be dozens of plane-building companies when the field was unregulated, with new, more efficient models and lower prices appearing regularly. I wonder what happened.
I heard that this is nonsense. There never were more than a handful of large aircraft builders (still are plenty of small ones), safety records certainly weren't better in the era before consolidation, and new entrants funded by the might of their governments have failed not because of regulation but because what airlines actually want is lots of identical aircraft from a reliable supplier and the new entrants haven't really been competitive in terms of performance either. The certification is complex, but so's building an aircraft, and it's really only the people further down the supply chain that need the protective umbrella...
And it bears repeating: regulation (even well meaning regulation) is not free and it always favors incumbents and hinders startups.
That's not true. EU regulations like the AI Act and Digital Services Act have different obligations and requirements for large and small businesses and that amount can't be zero because being a small business doesn't give you a free pass to cause damage to society.
I'd be curious to hear about specific examples of AI regulation that affect small businesses without a good reason.
Yes.
This is always going to be the case, because regulation is typically a form of friction.
It is the shape of regulation that matters, and ideology on either side of the divide is religion.
Good regulation and regulators would punish anti competitive behavior, but this will also act as a drag on firms, while preventing firms from reaching certain sizes and potential economies of scale.
The point is that regulation deserves to be understood and crafted well.
Those economies of scale are meaningless to consumers if it means a single firm squeezes everyone in the supply chain and captures the benefit for itself.
This is also a specific weakness in American conversations. The divide between free markets, competition, and regulation are ideological.
If you want good markets you need good regulation and incentive structuring.
Right now the weakly regulated American market is delivering staggering competition where massive corporations are fighting tooth and nail over my 100 bucks.
I kept hearing the same about previous age tech and there also Americans rule the Internet: Google Search, Workspace or m365, AWS, Cloudflare... Even Linus moved to the US.
They've been pretty efficient in squashing any potential competition because of that weak regulation, yes. Don't confuse it with competing on the merits of their products.
Why hasn't strong competition arise from well-regulated EU? Where are the superior European products? I'd gladly use them.
These are effective monopolies competing to become super monopolies - the period leading up to dominance by one or two is beneficial to consumers with freebies and cheap offers that also completely lock out any smaller players.
If you don't let such things develop in the first place then there's not enough money to round out and scale the product. So if we want world beating products we may need monopolies but we can nationalise them in the same way we nationalised big infrastructure in the past. Then at least we're not the tail wagging the dog anymore.
There's a big difference between governments regulating to benefit their own control and power, and regulating in favor of consumers. Most regulation in the EU have jack-all to do with consumers. There's a couple of niceties - having all prices displayed in comparable unites (EUR/kg, EUR/liter etc). But apart from that the regulation have broadly served as moats around the largest businesses.
There are many EU directives which benefit consumers directly in tech, including, but not limited to:
Consumer rights - 14 day cooling off period for online purchases
Sale of goods - 2 year seller liability for defective goods
Right to repair - likely doesn’t need explanation, require manufacturers to offer repairs and replacement parts
Unfair commercial practices - prevent misleading or deceptive advertising
Unfair contract terms directive - prevents disproportionately one-sided provisions in T&Cs (think Disney giving themselves legal immunity for a free Disney+ trial)
The EU’s problem seems to be in communicating its benefits to its citizens.
I wouldn't even call it a communication problem - I believe it's more a media problem, than anything. Good news are minimized and bad news are amplified to the maximum - nowadays even broadsheet newspapers operate with tabloid headlines, and that is really bad.
We somehow need to "want" a slower news cycle and simultaneously push back against the algorithmic outrage. The world is more predictable and safer than ever but the perception of the average person is not this, it's manufactured outrage at every possible opportunity and topic.
Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago, almost none feel that way and that is almost 100% due to the news algorithms being tuned to keep you in a constant dread cycle.
>Despite the average european objectively being better off and safer than a decade ago
I'm sure it's true, but do we have some statistics on that, and a comparison to places that doesn't have the same regulatory burden?
I can quote the German BKA:
number of crimes in 2016: 6,372,526
number of crimes in 2025 (last data): 5,508,559
https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...
https://www.bka.de/EN/CurrentInformation/Statistics/PoliceCr...
Awesome! But, looking at the numbers the decrease in totals are due to fewer registered "street crimes", less fraud and legalization of cannabis (removing a 183k comparable from 2016). Violent crimes however went from 193,542 to 212,335. With rapes almost doubling, going from 7,919 to 14,454 (82%). Murders remained stable though.
We can debate which of these crimes have a greater impact on the feeling of safety. Personally I don't really feel unsafe due to people being caught stealing a sweater or smoking weed (when that was illegal).
So I don't think this is as clear cut as the headline number makes it seem. I feel like it's valid if people want to put more weight on the violent crimes.
[dead]
> cooling off [...] seller liability [...] Right to repair
Let's not forget I am paying directly for those when I buy a product. Those benefits are not free, they cost money. The money has to come from somewhere. It can't come from profits (since those are the sacred reason the company exists in the first place) thus they will come from higher prices.
Higher product prices mean less competitive companies. It also means fewer startups which must implement the required regulation no matter the market says. Then you need protectionism against Chinese competition.
But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not. Thus my choice is reduced. I cannot vote with my wallet and send price signals in the market to tell sellers that I want those benefits or not and at what price. The market gets corrupted. The economy falters. Outside competitors gain. The Government needs to intervene again and again, growing stronger and more intrusive "for my own benefit".
It's the decay spiral we are witnessing here in the EU right now.
> But the worst is that I must pay for those benefits whether if I want them or not
that regulation acts as a lower bound on what it takes to do business in the place. You also pay for companies not dumping toxic material on the streets, for appliances not catching fire, for not eating rotten food and million other things. All of those regulations of course "corrupt" the market for the good of a society so it's not just a race to the bottom. The idea of a free for all market is an utopia that doesn't exist ... thankfully.
That... that is not exactly how things work.
The choices you are presented with, are always a function of market structure, aka the interplay of incentives, regulation, and competition.
You have a market because your taxes pay for many things, ranging from policing, to courts, to power and standards underlying how various systems work.
The choices presented to you are always a trade off vs other options. Having regulation that dictates how plug points and voltage works for example, reduces the choices you have, but the baseline standard means many other things can be built because standardization enables modularity.
The position that there exists some platonic ideal "choice" isn't even useful as an illustrative argument in this context.
Markets that are effective at ensuring better outcomes for the median or average consumer are things that have to be crafted. Figuring out the correct extent of intervention, (whether you champion less regulation or more) is the issue.
This!!!
I went to California earlier this year. In our apartment we had a freezer that was clearly made before politicians thought to decide to put a cap on how good a freezer could be. It was fucking amazing at freezing stuff. No freezer I've ever used could freeze this good. It was probably from the 80's - old/sturdy AF.
I wouldn't mind paying for some extra solar panels to feed it.
I’m not sure that’s a function of regulation but more a function of most modern freezers defaulting to -18°, where an American or industrial freezer is -22 to -28°C.
Getting a better energy efficiency score is one reason (and consumers are motivated on running cost, not just environmental) but presumably these are cheaper to manufacture as well.
I have an American style, EU-compliant freezer than I can set to -26° which I bought for preparing sashimi safely. It rocks! Highly recommend them.
Do you believe I can't get a list of 20 effective pro-consumer regulations drafted by the EU out of Gemini?
I don't think you're taking my "there's two sides to regulation" comment in good faith.
I gave a pretty clear example of pro-consumer regulation myself.
Saying that the EU is overregulating cannot possibly be that controversial, given that even the European politicians are beginning to admit it.. Draghi, Von der Leyen (even though she passes blame), Merz, Macron.
Maybe you should get that list from the European AI products that came from those awesome EU regulations.
That's not even true in the concrete case we're talking about here.
As part of the AI Act, an important decision on a person (such as a hiring decision) cannot be made without human involvement.
You think that's not in favor of "consumers"? (also note the implicitly submissive framing of humans as receptacles for consumption instead of subjects with rights!)
Why shouldn't it be possible to completely automate decisions? Imaginary entry level job, where you need to deliver parcels from one business to another. Qualifications: 1. Drivers license. 2: Eyes in your head. Applicant 1: Drivers license? No. Eyes in your head? Yes. Applicant 2: Drivers license? Yes. Eyes in your head? Yes.
Reject applicant 1 and accept applicant 2. Ez.
I'd prefer to work at a place that uses it's ressources on things that provide value. If we're able to conserve ressources by automating hiring, I'm all for it. I don't want to take a pay-cut to hire meat-proxies.
> (48) The extent of the adverse impact caused by the AI system on the fundamental rights protected by the Charter is of particular relevance when classifying an AI system as high risk. Those rights include the right to human dignity, respect for private and family life, protection of personal data, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and of association, the right to non-discrimination, the right to education, consumer protection, workers’ rights, the rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, intellectual property rights, the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, the right of defence and the presumption of innocence, and the right to good administration. [...]
> (57) AI systems used in employment, workers management and access to self-employment, in particular for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions affecting terms of the work-related relationship, promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for allocating tasks on the basis of individual behaviour, personal traits or characteristics and for monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships,
> should also be classified as high-risk, since those systems may have an appreciable impact on future career prospects, livelihoods of those persons and workers’ rights. Relevant work-related contractual relationships should, in a meaningful manner, involve employees and persons providing services through platforms as referred to in the Commission Work Programme 2021.
> Throughout the recruitment process and in the evaluation, promotion, or retention of persons in work-related contractual relationships, such systems may perpetuate historical patterns of discrimination, for example against women, certain age groups, persons with disabilities, or persons of certain racial or ethnic origins or sexual orientation. AI systems used to monitor the performance and behaviour of such persons may also undermine their fundamental rights to data protection and privacy
I suggest reading the regulation(s), it usually does a good job laying down the reasoning in the preamble.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng
I am European and would like European AI so I tried mistral this month.
Their own models seems like years old OpenAI models, hallucinations all over the place and coding was crazy slow.
I can only say two good things about them:
- their hosted glm model was fast - because I canceled within 14 days they gave me a full refund.
This is a bottom feeder mentality. Europe has enough bright people and resources to truly compete in the AI race. There is something wrong when the only selling point is that it's local.
We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.
But a better model almost always comes with a better dollar-per-task-accomplished ratio, compared to worse models.
So not only outpriced, outperformed, but also outregulated.
Idk i wish there was some bright light in the future, but i dont see it
I would rather LLM cost curves go down 10x and then we really do something.
We need a lot more hardware for universal LLMs (probably 10x, if not more), and we need it to be cheaper.
If anything, I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
> I would fund a DRAM maker in Europe.
I wouldn't. I can think of at least 10 regulations (labor and environmental chef amongst them) that would render such a maker uncompetitive from the start. Chinese makers would eat its lunch.
Doesn't matter, we need to opt out of the rat race that consists of making the planet worse for the next generations in exchange of quick bucks for the oligarchs.
The way is to factor externalities in the final price, reward sustainable behaviour and set better standards. And that's what's going on: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/how-europes-new-...
The same applies to labour conditions and quality standards. And don't bring up arguments like "it can't work" or "that hurt competitiveness": all workers around the world want the exact same thing, a livable planet for their children. The only ones to object are the global elite who one ends up defending when they make the current status quo sound inevitable.
We used to have some. Also, regarding labor, that part boggles the mind. Aren't those factories supposed to be highly automated?
Also, at this point DRAM availability is becoming a security risk.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. We can have open weight, yet close-to-frontier models. China has very strong models that can also run locally.
How much money are Europeans paying to US companies for AI services and how much are Americans paying to EU companies? I don't think it's a good idea to let billions of dollars go to other countries because you couldn't be bothered to build a competitive product.
That's true, however, if you are too far from the top models, you still are in danger of not being in the race anymore.
And with half the score of the top models, that's where Mistral is at.
As it is now, no tech company in the EU will use it, if they were just 80% from the top, that would be more feasible.
Why hasn't Baidu taken over the world's search market?
What moat does Google have that's so special in search?
You need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to scale globally in search. And you have to take the market away from Google at the same time. Good luck.
OpenAI and Anthropic are doing that right now in LLMs, hyper scaling to a billion people. Having a billion users you can actually serve is a moat.
When OpenAI is done attaching a full ad model to GPT, they'll be able to serve a billion users profitably globally with zero subscriptions. This is what keeps Google up at night: ~$500 billion in ad revenue up for grabs circa 2030.
Any service with hundreds of millions of users is a lucrative ad business. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
OpenAI's moat, if they get there soon enough, is that they'll be able to lean into a high margin ad business to press down on the market and kill everybody. You won't be able to serve the infrastructure to compete at the cost structure they'll able to subsidize at via the high margin ad business. This is an extraordinarily straight-forward move, and it's comically anti-competitive, and nobody will stop them from doing it. Their mistake is that they're at least two years behind where they should be in advertising.
Anthropic is the one at the most risk from the Chinese models, they have the weaker everyday consumer side. Enterprise won't be supported by an ad model very well.
To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment.
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’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 haven't heard of updates on ESMC in a while, but that has been a thing on the horizon for a while, with production planned to start in fall 2027 last I read.
> 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.
The CCP is able to plan the economy. We used to be able to do that in the 60s-70s, at least in France, but that mindset is long gone.
I mean the EU has ASML, why can’t we go the rest of the way? Seems kinda shortsighted and I say that as someone who bought the Intel Arc A580 on release and don’t regret it.
We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.
> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.
You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.
No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:
- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).
- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.
- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.
There is a big difference in compute requirements between EU and US.
EU needs to meet their own demand, the US wants to be the global provider.
No, I think most of the recent huge datacenter buildups are for US AI efforts only in the AI arms race, not to be rented out.
Thank god.
you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?
>They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons.
We've been migrating all of our AI automations from Gemini to Mistral because of the fear of data transfer regulations. Maybe they don't apply to us (we don't really feed personal data to AI), but we can't afford to find out.
It's been quite annoying too because the Mistral documentation and dashboards are all over the place.
Fear of fines... that's not what I would call "the right reasons".
Mistral models are way worse than Chinese models in the real world. It's not benchmarks.
Mistral doesn't look like it's benching at all. They're just as well funded as a lot of Chinese labs doing much more interesting work R&D-wise. Tailoring products for compliance doesn't cut it IMO, but I'm not in their shoes.
I also think their business model is interesting in that they can also serve Chinese models e.g GLM and fine tune them for enterprises.
which is a market Chinese labs won't get into.
they only other company they compete with is probably palantir in that regard.
Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.
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.
"something that will work reliably and predictably for years" is not really the class of product being sold, unless you're using a fine-tuned SLM to do something like classification. The vast majority of work being done with AI unfortunately benefits from being run on the biggest/best model.
> clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs
What’s contrarian? Dont they also sell API and subscription like every other lab?
who says they aren't benchmaxxing?
I want an intelligent model, which Mistral does not have.
With how they’re currently being used we might as well call them bendmarks.
Every newly released model is paraded as SOTA showing peak or near peak performance on cherry-picked bendmarks the model was either fine-tuned on, or tested under specific conditions optimal for that model.
Is it really contrarian though? Cohere, Aleph Alpha and many other model companies went that route and are doing well
How you know that they are not realy benchmaxxxing? Maybe they just have skill issue in this olimpics.
I tried them via OpenRouter. I loved their OCR. I really disliked their code generation. It was about six months ago -- so it was a geological era ago in this world. However Mistral is legally favored in Europe. In fact from my point of view , using them presents no trouble with GDPR (I live and work in Europe). I'm NOT a lawyer but I'm a technician that define itself 'privacy savy'.
are you saying current frontier AI labs is benchmaxxxing and not because the AI model is good ?????
You crazy to think that Fable and Astra capabilities is fake
The winning strategy seems to be actual capabilities plus cheating.
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.
Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
LOL yea as if that was the reason for LLMs
Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets.
Where in the fuck did we stall out?
If life is a exponential curve, the moment we stopped overproducing exponential energy and ate the planet up for this.. that was when we stalled.
Please speak English so that an LLM can understand you