I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.

Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".

Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?

From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?

I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

I think what Mistral is doing is smart within their financial constraints, but this comparison is misleading. Mistral is an LLM company; Apple is a consumer hardware and services company.

It's smart for Apple not to join the LLM arms race, because they can just pick the cheapest supplier and let other companies take the financial losses. Mistral is in a very different situation; they are the supplier.

Apple _owns_ computers in people's pockets. There are very few businesses that can match this value. What does Mistral own? A head start at best. For the record I like Mistral and hope they succeed, but you're comparing apples to oranges.

Apple is not an AI company, Mistral is. it's not really a fair comparison

Apple and Mistral are not in the same market.

Siri is a minor part of the Apple ecosystem. Fundamentally, it can call into a better LLM provided by a better company. Siri's only utility is that it has access to your iData and can control your iDevices.

Apple sells devices. They have benefited a lot from their devices being good (Apple Silicon).

Mistral sells LLMs. They would benefit from having good LLMs.

They are not the same kind of companies but they benefit both in their own way of the same market reading.

Apple is fine-tunning Gemini to customize Siri for their customers. They improve what's between the model and their customers : fine tune, inference up to the product. This is exactly what Mistral is doing, with an even more diversity of usage and needs because they are business oriented, instead of customer oriented. This is also what make them economically very efficient in comparison.

Beside Apple is still doing science experiments while Mistral is capable of releasing commercial models, albeit small and specialized.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely obvious that Apple is incredibly powerful, now more than ever. But the way they see the future, Mistral have a leaner trajectory.

It's a mistake when Apple does it too, they're back in the same situation they were with Google Maps in the early iPhone days.

Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.

One is american, the other is european

It's the same with gaming

When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"

Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

One is a AI company first, the other has tons of other services and they can just buy those outright.

Apple is not "racing", Apple is just paying other companies for service of LLM.

Which is smart move

Apple tried at AI integration and fumbled the bag repeatedly.

In 2010s, they were among the "greats" of consumer AI. After 2022, they kept trying, and just had delays and underperformance. I don't think their actions now are "strategy" and not "skill issue".

Apple is a hardware company.

Lmao imagine saying Mistral and Apple are in the same position.. wtf.

AI company not keeping up with AI companies is by no definition the same as combinedhardwaresoftwareservicesentertainmentlifestyletechcompany not keeping up with AI companies

I am baffled by the responses to this, not seeing that a similar strategy can be applied in a different field.

> When Apple is not racing for the frontier it's a strategy, but when it's Mistral it's a mistake.

Apple is a $4.7 trillion company selling computers and iPhones. How many computers and iPhones is Mistral selling?

In your comparison Apple is Apple while Mistral is orange.

Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.

Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.

Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.

> once they're good enough for coding aid

The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.

They are now serving GLM52 and the 15€ sub comes with a nice included quota. So I get good code assist and pay a EU company for it.

People have been using LLMs for two year. It's not just this week's LLM release that is capable something.

> don't care about benchmarks

You must care about good benchmarks (identify those that have relevance).

After living in the US for several years, I was happy to return to the EU where regulations exist to protect against the worst corporate behavior.

My American bank sold my credit card transactions to advertisers. My American mobile operator had insane fees for roaming and other features that are basic in Europe. Sending a bank transfer in America was unreliable and slow and expensive because there was nothing like SEPA instant 24/7 free transfer (I guess FedWire does that nowadays, I don’t know if consumers actually have guaranteed access at all banks like they do in EU).

When American AI companies become established Fortune 100 members, they’ll start abusing their customers just like all the others in that club, those banks and phone operators and Microsoft and the rest. Google once pretended to be different, now they have the corporate cancer. No reason to believe the same won’t happen to OpenAI and Anthropic.

> They are regulationmaxxing instead of benchmaxxing, that's my problem with them.

To those who is in know (r/localllama, r/sillytavernai), is well aware that Mistral models - at least the small, <=24b ones - are the least censored, even less than Chinese.

This is strategy of laggers. Everybody do that when found themselves in the situation. Including US and China.

Don't make me laugh. Who has actually sat in Congress and told congress leaders to push regulatory capture?

Not Mistral

You're confusing with Anthropic .

They are definitely feeding off the fear of US control from US companies and institutions, but you can't blame them for reaping the benefits of Trump's lunacy.

Amodei and Altman on the other hand are relentlessly pushing for regulation to bar open weight competition from eating their lunch.

Which provisions of which regulation are you complaining about, related to AI?

It bears repeating - all markets get regulated.

Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.

But above all, if AI wasn’t hyped as a threat to humanity, to jobs, to security, regulation could have been cautious.

To add insult to injury, given how voters are tired of technology, expecting a different move from governments is a losing bet.

We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

To compete, we’d have to throw a lot of the regulations and laws into the trash (especially anything regarding copyright) and do an order of magnitude more investment.

I’m surprised that there’s no domestic chip production either, we don’t have our own CPUs or GPUs, meanwhile China is spinning up manufacturing so they don’t have to work around the Nvidia export restrictions as much.

I like Mistral and there’s cool stuff going on like how EuroLLM models know Latvian language and all the other EU ones better than way bigger models, but we don’t have anything frontier.

At the very least, they should be distilling Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 as much as possible and working on MoE models like ~35B and ~120B versions to match Qwen.

We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it. That would be mostly fine if it were only VC money but it's not.

No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

you mean like Boeing vs Airbus?

Then your choice is either a US mega corp under the Trump partial dictatorship shitshow or a Chinese model distillation factory that could turn on you at any second.

I understand that there are users that would prefer another option, especially in the EU.

There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.

The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.

Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.

You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.

The winning strategy seems to be actual capabilities plus cheating.

Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.

Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.

I think Europe was at risk of being left without even a foot in the door. Mistral os one of few such feet. Just having some compute and know how for running Chinese models is better than nothing. Low bar I know but still. Who knows what R&D they’re doing while keeping the business running.

I’m not sure really what the winning strategy is in this weird arms race.

If there’s one thing the legacy, dying industrial companies of Europe love, it’s consulting.

So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China.

Which would be the most European outcome ever.

> any open-weight self-hosted chinese model might as well have been made by Von der Leyen herself.

This is simply wrong. Plenty of security-sensitive companies and agencies disallow the use of any Chinese model out of hand. Given the black box nature of LLMs, the fact that it's "open weight" is irrelevant to the trust calculus, and the fact that it's self hosted barely adds anything.

> It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing

I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.

I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.

Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.

I don't get it when people all claim that AGI is a winner takes all game. It is not (unless it is used as a weapon). When one company reaches AGI, there will be a dozen very close to AGI, given time. Also a winner is not going to drive everyone else out of business, it is the opposite, one winner will have people betting on the second and the third winners, the technology will also help other develops. Once you have a good enough model, everything will be incremental. I think the hardware capability will be the real burden, not the model itself. If AGI is as powerful as it sounds, maybe hardware won't be a problem any more.

Europe is a different beast. They build and distribute rails, they don’t compete on frontier capabilities. When the civic benefits of AI become clear, EU is in a position to mandate their distribution. US develops capabilities that remain stuck in heterogeneous corporate silos without interop. Payments is a good point of comparisons between the two approaches.

Well, then Samsung Electronics appears to be dumb for leading this investment round? They probably only do it because they're European...oh, wait...

> so if you don't have the most intelligent or cheapest model in the world, you're losing

So how does this match up to the fact that there is currently OpenAI and Anthropic, both raking in money? They can't both have the smartest model at the same time, can they? And all those inference companies selling API access to open weight models on OpenRouter, which are apparently also earning billions already? While the former are probably bound to have much higher cost for research and training than they are currently earning, which may be called "losing", the latter don't have that problem, they can simply price their API access such that the money earned covers their costs, no training and practically no research necessary. In your theory these companies shouldn't have a cent of earnings.

China is actively tripping the US up by pushing the open-weight strategy, which is kind of smart. They realized that they obviously will not be able to make Western companies trust Chinese companies enough to just use proprietary models by sending all their data to services hosted by Chinese companies. The US is still able to attract this trust, although it's eroding quickly in spite of recent political events and the current trust is more or less a function of old habits that need some time to change. But China correctly found that - due to there being no old habits to piggyback on - they wouldn't ever be able to compete in this way, even if they had proprietary foundation models superior to their US counterparts, so they decided to throw sticks into the spokes of the US frontier labs by releasing top open-weight models worth billions of dollars in training cost and thereby devaluing the huge proprietary investments of the US labs.

That is absolutely not "do nothing".

Europe is not China, I repeat we are not China, they build stuff. A guy from Austria ended up on Chinese national TV due to the bizarre way he had to obtain an AC unit this summer. Let's stop the larp.

It couldn't tell ASML to do that because ASML doesn't do chip design.

Ehm, sorry, but no, this is not how lithography works. You cannot "hide" functionality in circuitry your machines are producing if your machines' job is to shine light through a mask.

You'd have to be the producer of the machine producing the mask. Or, even better, the software that produces the plan according to which a machine produces a mask.

Do you think that's a good thing?

> Spain is exceptionally liberal on LGBT issues while remaining more religious than some northern countries

When you move here, "more religious" turns out to pretty much be window dressing. Yes, they still celebrate a bunch of the old catholic holidays, parading saints around on feast days, but apart from a handful of older folks, nobody actually believes.

Particularly when compared to the US, where a large minority is still going around loudly thumping bibles, Spain is a very secular country.

You are conflating two concepts into one words, immigration and illegal immigration are not the same thing

It’s a different culture with different rules, if it was that easy it would have been done already. See my other comment about lack of budget at a federal level.

They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

This "Non-Signatory Participants : Taiwan *" is so weird precisely because Taiwan is the one who started the Silicon shield few years ago by making TSMC central to the whole ecosystem.

This is a spectacularly prejudiced and insulting comment.

Pay isn't the main problem with Paris, it's quality of life.

Housing near work is mostly old Haussmannian buildings that are rent capped and where demand far exceeds supply, so most of the stock is unmaintained. You either accept bad housing in the city or live in the suburbs and commute — not ideal.

To make matters worse, French companies (especially old-school ones) have a culture of presenteeism for white collar jobs, it's uncommon for people to leave before 6PM and staying late is rewarded as high engagement.

Lastly, you might consider buying and renovating a house so you can escape this dilemma, but it isn't cheap: 2-bedroom (T3) around 700k euros, that represents 20 years of frugal savings on 90k gross.

Vacation, cheap and good healthcare, and unemployment benefits are great in France, but the current government has been eroding these social benefits, and those are not unique to France for well-paid tech workers anyway.

> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

Maybe this appeal to mediocrity in a competitive market explains Mistral's mediocre performance.

I'm Australian. We have 4 weeks paid leave a year, comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage.

Most of my career I avoided taking leave, and I'd usually just get it paid out when I left. Who wants to take leave when you are doing the most interesting, most important thing you can imagine doing?

> quite a lot of folks are happy having a top 5% salary in their own county, without all the stresses and risks of working in the US.

Yes, absolutely, the problem is these are not the people you want to hire.

And the people you do want to hire are either already in US or work for a US company remotely for 3x the salary.

> When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.

Come on. We're talking about a salary that is ONE THIRD of what you'd get at AI labs in US (plus the stock and the bonus). And significantly less taxes. Are you sure that 5 weeks of vacation, what you call "comprehensive" healthcare (spoiler alert: it's not), and unemployment coverage are worth 180K/year reduction in salary (pre-taxes)?

To not talk about the toxic environment that European companies generate in general. Ie: "you should be grateful you have this job".

Usually the us position is unlimited pto and yes you have options if laid off

> Does the US position come with 5 weeks paid vacation? When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

Work a US job for 4 months, quit, take the next 8 months for holiday/vacation, and you still save more money than a European SWE.

Hey, the 2010s are calling, they want the trope “BuT eUrOpE hAs pAiD lEaVe” back.

Europe in 2026 (France, Germany, UK, Estonia, etc). What a joke. Nobody in the world respects them.

At least the US has jobs and a military. Not as good as before, but better than Europe.

And 180k in Germany, even in Berlin is pretty good. You are living a very good life with that salary.

Beats 90% of Canadian software engineer salaries. If I wasn't tied down with 2 border collies, a chicken, a cat, and, uh, wife and kids, I'd jump to that in an instant. German quality of life is still pretty good despite all their complaining.

I imagine you could do so while working for an US AI Lab in Zurich for five times the net pay.

You dont even live in the Alps with 90K lmao. And if you expect top performance, you should expect top salary. Or at least something competitive. 90K for a company like Mistral is a bit embarrassing.

I actually live in Paris and get your point, but at some point you have to face the reality of the market/industry and really try your best to get good folks to join, especially in the current climate where US researchers may be looking for greener pastures.

US software companies (Google, Meta, MS, etc) have offices in Paris and they pay way more than that. Especially if you take into account total comp (Mistral is private so any stocks you get are "locked" until IPO or sell out)

Yes 90k is more than most French software companies pay, but the salary needs to be competitive with those US companies.

But you should be able to hire most of the people you want, not just some that happen to pick Paris.

Also, if given a choice of 90k eur in Paris vs let's say 2m usd in US I'm pretty sure suddenly most of the issues people have with US would suddenly disappear ;)

Local models or independent hosting companies. Like Baseten, but there could be dozens of them.

if you have a computer to run said local GLM models one

You sure? Kimi K2 Thinking was apparently build by just 80 people and not more funding.

Chinese models are trained on dubiously collected model traces from Claude/OpenAI that are purchased from model routers. All the major Chinese models use this data. That's one reason they've been able to catch up with Anthropic/OpenAI so quickly, they have so much data.

Mistral can't train on that data, because this data would be illegal to purchase & train on in the EU.

They've never made a near-frontier model. Which is a valid criticism for a model training company

> can you elaborate what are their fundamental flaws that are not fixable by funds?

Culture.

In terms of output, EU working culture is inferior to American/Chinese working culture.

Work life balance is irrelevant for frontier/sovereign AI.

there was "H" at paris at the time, they raised 200M or so, but never got so much visibility. don't know at which stage they are now or if they accomplished something

Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.

I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.

No, Thiel is talking about the UN and global minimum taxes when he talks about the Antichrist.

If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.

I think you're confused here.

a16z is Humpty Dumpty and Temu Lex Luthor.

The antichrist is Greta Thunberg.

The power is in the hands of a few people obsessed or possessed. Gambling addiction, narcissism, power hunger.

Taxation will not solve this before the global society collapses so the question is whether we figure out a way to level the power.

This is not evil, but a trait of human nature of corruption or addiction to power.

> the will of the people.

there is so such thing.

if there is it sure is very flexible and forgetful

They will also be faster in space. Relatively. The data transmission might be the bottleneck then, but who knows - a rocket full of ssds might go a long way.

Highly improbable given China is ready to pick up any slack.

OpenAI also indirectly depends on ASML, but sadly Europe seems too cowardly to leverage this dependency at the moment.

Blocking EU from those services would crash the valuation of US AI companies, so I'm not expecting it to happen.

You'd still have access to the Chinese models though right? Even if you want to argue they aren't truly SOTA they're still pretty dang good.

Is there money in niche models?

Anthropic is thought to be cash flow positive now.

If not, I’m buying stocks

I think the Pro and other subs allow them to save big on ads (Claude Code use is required and it pushes their ads) and allow easy access to free data (CC occasionally solicits feedback and session sharing, which I'm pretty sure some users oblige). Also CC does massive prompt caching tailored to work in lockstep with their platform. With all that and who knows what else, I'd say it balances over time.

On a higher level it might make sense to build the expertise that comes with base training. I dont know enough about the process to estimate these gains, but china has been doing it in manufacturing for decades. All the money in the world is useless when no one knows how to do the thing

A Visual Novel. Its from a Software-Engineering standpoint interesting, since the requirements for this specific Use-Case are immense.

Care to share any more?

I am sure plenty of people had the same thought.

Stay out of the race sounds insane when AI is, and will be, a common commodity. China is getting great bang for their buck on AI training, why not the same for Europe?

I’m still looking for no-moatists to logically explain why there is no moat in SOTA LLMS.

That paper released by a lone Google employee 3 years ago still misguiding people it seems.

"Probably safer to stay out of the race for now."

What kind of attitude is that?