You are severely misusing the term monopoly.
There is demand for AI that is not US or China controlled. Mistral is serving that demand.
You are severely misusing the term monopoly.
There is demand for AI that is not US or China controlled. Mistral is serving that demand.
That demand is enshrined in law and being forced through coercion. It is the definition of a government dictated monopoly.
Nobody is preventing other Europeans from setting up AI companies
Just the lack of capital, lack of electricity, lack of datacenters, lack of gpus. Of course to navigate all that you have to fight endless regulations in the EU.
No one prevented other people from running their own AT&T phone company in the US. Except the lack of capital, and endless regulations with running telephone polls across the US.
Google even tried more recently to run their own fiber optics and gave up in the end because of entrenched regulations making it impossible to challenge the modern monopolies internet providers have.
Lack of capital, datacentres and GPUs being the barrier to competition in European AI giants is the exact opposite of a "government sanctioned monopoly"...
That is like saying AT&T didn't have a government sanctioned monopoly, even though the primary thing stopping datacenters in the EU is regulatory hurdles.
Mistral isn't even close to the most used AI services in the EU, there are very few industries where EU sourced/hosted models are required (mostly ones where the US also either mandates US models or is seeking to...) and the potential behaviour of the US government (rational and irrational) is at least as big a contributor to European companies being cautious about dependency on US cloud models as EU regulation. Regulatory hurdles exist to building datacentres in the US and basically everywhere else, and don't favour Mistral over any other company, and European states and the EU are busy funding [notional] competitors
It is not, even really stretching the definition, a state sanctioned monopoly.
"The definition of a government dictated monopoly".
This is a joke right?