The usian 'frontier' "AI" corporations are involved in severe human rights abuses and war crimes.

I'm not so sure the ideal should be to substitute for those.

It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.

There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.

In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

You don't see how protecting the commons from being exploited by hypercapitalists for their own profit is protecting the rights of the average person?

Yep. I wonder if being at the forefront of AI makes for a better & more free society.

Not at all, they can just use the petabytes of data sold on the cheap by American and Chinese companies instead of their own.

I am not denying Mistral is not top tier anymore, (except OCR and STT for speed/efficency) just that the AI Act is not the reason they are not.

But we will see, they have very interesting Enterpise Use Cases, like with Mistral Forge.

And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

Europe lost religion and gained this instead.

You can do what frontier labs do today which is to properly license things that are copyrighted and use open source web crawls for things that don’t have copyright issues. You can then also commission new datasets (volume needed goes down when quality is high).

The European regulations are the thing that will kneecap anything meaningful coming out of Europe. Mind blowing to me that this is worth the tradeoff since Europe will be beholden to other frontier labs be it China or the US, so regulations accomplishing very little if anything on impacting actual AI development and losing vast amounts of leverage in the process.

It had input from entrepreneurs but was disregarded.

The culture's still all wrong. If you have a startup that failed in SV, that's par for the course. Better luck next time! If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???

Deepmind lab is a US company.

> all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.

Off the top of my head, ARM is from Cambridge.

> reducing unskilled and hateful immigration is the democratic thing do

Hateful, sure, though just like all those on the right who say the first word of "hate crime" is redundant, I'd argue home-grown hate's just as dangerous as imported.

But "unskilled" immigration? When the topic is AI? If this stuff works as advertised, *nobody's skills matter any more*. If it doesn't at least render many of our skills obsolete, why build it? If you make an AI which can't automate anything, how is this not a waste of money?

Even without that, I've not seen anyone who knows about Baumol's cost disease opine either way about migration, high or low skilled.

Actually yea, it has everything to do with it.

I am open to the idea that we should handle immigration differently, but I want a plan and specifics, not slogans. What we want to achieve, and by what mechanisms you plan to get there. Open any newspaper: are you more likely to find careful and considerate opinions or racist screeds?

And that is the problem. Time and energy and money and political capital are routinely spent on inconsequential electoral poliTICS rather than substantial poliCY.

That's how you get something like Ariane 6 -- engineered to satisfy political constraints rather that to be competitive. Granted, NASA or to some extent the US military have the same problem.

> isnt the eu basically a less federalist version of the usa?

And what good does it do? The EU cannot speak in a single voice - there is no foreign minister, no defense minister, no whatever minister.

Like the EU foreign function: you have a person claiming to be the EU voice, and then you have the foreign ministers of every EU member that can just say whatever they want if what the EU voice says is contrary to their political game in their own country. Same for the other functions.

Being less federalist is not better, it is worse. The EU does not speak in a single voice in any domain.

Sort of, if you squint right.

The EU is in some ways closer to a confederation, but with various "hacks" - in the form of various treaties - to try to work around the problems that led the US to abandon it in favour of a federal model.

It's largely down to very different levels of willingness to integrate more, and various levels of opposition to the kind of constitutional changes that would be required for a federal model.

Id say the EU is less federal because each member country maintains its own sovereignty and local laws. Its more of a coalition of the willing. While in the US the federal gov can override states. The EU also has each state vote on different legislations. (Massive oversimplification)

Because the laws are different? Are you really confused?

In the US, the freedom is explicitly for the people, not Federal nor State government. States are relatively more free than the Federal government, but both are greatly restricted by the Constitution. Before the Constitution, the US had a previous government under the Articles of Confederation (see below) that had many deficiencies and only gave freedom to member States.

The EU is organized more similar to the US under the Articles of Confederation.

The first American government (Articles of Confederation) gave State governments almost unlimited power e.g. they could print their own money. It did not grant freedom to the people in any meaningful way. States were free to abuse this power both against their own citizens and, more importantly, the other member States. This created many practical problems.

The second and current American government (Constitution) learned lessons from this experience. It removed a limited set of key powers from the States and gave it to the Federal government such as the creation of currency. It also forced all States to interact with each other on the same terms, with strict oversight from the Federal government. Additionally, it explicitly granted rights to the people rather than their State governments, since the States had demonstrated they could not be trusted to do the right thing. These changes forced the States to play nicely with each other and treat their people better.

These changes were a large improvement. Almost every law an American experiences is State law, because States have much more freedom to create laws. The Federal government can only make laws from a short list. Both State and Federal governments are strictly prohibited from creating many kinds of laws.

In the US, freedom is for the people, not for the member States. The Federal government has even less freedom than the member States to make law.

The US lays claim to all kinds of bullshit. But more to the point; different values, different laws - does it matter how centralized the control is? I would argue neither is “more” free, just free in different ways. US has a huge problem in equal access to the law, which undermines freedom no matter how good the laws are.

>You don't think US states compete with, undercut and stifle each other?

Compete with each other, yes.

But all US states take pride in Silicon Valley being American.

No EU project for its own "Silicon Valley" can succeed, because the French would insist on it being in France, Germans would insist on Germany, Dutch in the Netherlands, etc.

Well, the front page of their website claims "Frontier AI In Your Hands", so I guess they're not marketing it that way.

I personally think there's a hint in that Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 5x the price of Mistral Large 3, and that Mistral Large is not listed anymore as a "Featured Model" and hasn't been updated since Dec 2025:

https://docs.mistral.ai/models/overview

But what I really base it on is an interview the Mistral CEO gave on the Big Technology Podcast back in January this year:

Alex Kantrowitz: "Do you consider yourself, is the most important thing you do building the models? Or is the most important thing you do the service? Are you primarily a model builder, or primarily a service provider?"

Arthur Mensch: "We are there to help our customers get to value."

Alex Kantrowitz: "So, service!"

Arthur Mensch: "We are here to... but to get to value, they need to have great models. And to get to value, they need to have the right tools to train the models. And so the best way to train, to create those tools, is effectively to train the best models. So the two things are extremely linked together. We create models that are very easy to customize. We create models with tools that we then export to our customers, so that they can use them, and we help our customers train their own models. You can't go and sell to an enterprise that you are going to help them create great custom systems, if you can't show to the world that you are effectively the leader in open source technology. So the two parts are equally important, the first is enabling the other, and there's effectively a flywheel there because we make our choices when it comes to the model design in a way that is enabling the various customers we have. As one example, we've put a lot of emphasis on having models that are great at physics, because we work with manufacturing companies that run into physical problems. So that's the flywheel we have set up. Having the science team and the business team sit together."

It's at 22:37 in the video. Elsewhere in the podcast he mentions that they don't believe in a large unified generic model, they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models (OCR, TTS, bespoke trained)... but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp link for that part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUTdyEDpbU&t=1357s

Howre you going distill if they block your access e.g. Fable