> Man, a lot of this discussion sounds like people cheering for the last kid crossing the finish line.
Sometimes it's ok to cheer for the last kid crossing the finish line because they're actually running a totally different race, and winning might look completely different.
When I look at what Mistral does vs other organizations I'm impressed:
They aren't profitable yet, but they're a lot closer than most and they're doing a hell of a lot with very little.
Pointless racing story:
I was in high school track with a really tough guy who was just not a runner. We went to a pretty messed up high school and if you screwed around in track practice sometimes the coach would make you run a crap race at the next meet, like steeplechase or hurdles. Well this guy and a few others screwed up and coach made them all run hurdles at a meet.
He hooked every single one and fell on his face. Every time he got back up and kept on running. By the time he hit the finish line his knees were bleeding halfway down to his ankles. We cheered like hell and he was smiling ear to ear.
Coach quit punishing us with races after that.
I read that site quite differently from you. You seem to be analyzing absolute differences but ROI is really about ratio of spending to revenue.
It looks like Mistral is middle of the pack, behind Anthropic and ahead of OpenAI on that front. All of those labs are way "ahead" of the cloud providers, but those providers are building infrastructure, not just training models, so it's not apples to apples.
Yeah that's a good point. The numbers are smaller and I was looking at it absolutely.
Speaking from an absolute perspective I do think they are doing more with their money than either Anthropic or OpenAI.