France's Mistral Built a $14B AI Empire by Not Being American(www.forbes.com)
40 pointsby rzk2 hours ago5 comments
  • recsv-heredoca minute ago
    LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'.

    Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones?

    I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all.

    What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?

  • pu_pe5 minutes ago
    Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
  • phillc732 hours ago
    I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action.

    I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can.

    After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality.

    Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.

    • Havocan hour ago
      There is also risky from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed.

      Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade…

      See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy

  • aurareturn21 minutes ago
    In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term.

    At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term.

    • rsynnott8 minutes ago
      Particularly if you’re in a regulated industry, “not American” and “not Chinese” _do_ provide value; they reduce risk.

      In particular, the framework under which European companies can transfer data to US companies at all is beyond fragile.

    • nairboon14 minutes ago
      Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
    • johngossman7 minutes ago
      Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United States. I think you are also underestimating the power of regulation. Not all European businesses have to be all-in for Mistral (or another alternative) to survive. This is one reason so many countries still have domestic defense, aerospace, and even automobile companies.
    • 15 minutes ago
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    • Tade03 minutes ago
      It is a good business model when the differentiator is that your company doesn't have just two modes:

      1. Starting shit.

      2. Thinking about starting shit.

      At least in the EU people are willing to pay more for fewer features so long as the two mentioned points are not the entire strategy.

    • goodluckchuck16 minutes ago
      This phrasing disregards the value of those traits. For example there are very clean and nice public restrooms at my local park, and I use them sometimes, but I usually use the one in my house.
  • eigenspace2 hours ago
    IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy.

    It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.