You are severely misusing the term monopoly.
replyThere 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.
replyNobody is preventing other Europeans from setting up AI companies
replyJust 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.
replyNo 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"...
replyThat 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.
replyMistral 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
replyIt is not, even really stretching the definition, a state sanctioned monopoly.
"The definition of a government dictated monopoly".
replyThis is a joke right?
A lot of national defense stuff is a de facto "government sanctioned monopoly" and this is certainly the same flavor. Market forces are different if the industry is perceived to be vital to continued sovereignty.
replyBeing the only(?) competitive European model probably makes them a de-facto monopoly for doing sensitive European stuff.
reply[dead]
replyWhich government? Sanctioned how? What stops other European companies from competing with Mistral? Is the situation better in the US?
replyThat's rich coming from a country who's top AI contender just announced 80B in yearly losses. Looks a lot like a subsidised duopoly to me.
reply72B of the 80B was paper losses due to stock exercises and not related to cash flow.
replyWho's subsidizing it?
replyAlso what about SpaceX, Meta and Google? They are clearly still in the game. They are all ahead of Mistral.
french are pretty proud man. pro-euro europeans too!
replyI mean, the model architecture is basically that of GLM 5.3 with slightly more parameters and slightly more active parameters, so it should probably be able to beat GLM 5.3 enough post-training.
replyActually, with Trump in the Office, "AI/Data Sovereignty" is quite a strong market forces. From Europe point-of-view, any US company is a potential risk (hello Starlink)
reply;-)
There is one word too many in that last line. The US is no longer a 'potential' risk.
replyIt's well known that every Mistral employee is a fonctionnaire. No.
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