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.
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
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.
I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term.
Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
In particular, the framework under which European companies can transfer data to US companies at all is beyond fragile.
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.
China isn't going to be friendly any time soon and so far America seems to be getting more in rather than less hostile. It wasn't that long ago that an American-Danish war was a realistic scenario.
Was a scenario? Isn't it still a possible scenario? As far as I know, the President of the United States has never formally recognized and apologized for this blatant violation of the UN Charter Art. 2.4. For all we know, in the absence of this realization, the US is still plotting to violate the territorial integrity of Denmark.
but, if you are lucky, you can but enough time to become competitive in that sector.
That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.
No, just really hard. Tackling one problem and thinking it done is the same error as taking one step and thinking you've climbed Mount Everest; the converse is the same, just as one cannot climb Mount Everest without the first step, one also cannot become independent without making the first independent replacement for one the links in the chain you rely on.
American designed. The GPUs are made in Taiwan, the RAM in South Korea, using machines from the Netherlands' ASML.
True independence is indeed hard and expensive. But it's also not the job of Mistral to tackle all the layers at the same time, not even the state-owned corporations of western Europe in the 20th century (and the EU isn't (yet) even a state) tried to tackle every stage of an industrial process by themselves.
...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.
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?
This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.
EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves.
I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure.
I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.
Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month.
I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account.
Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
Definitely not really acceptable though nonetheless; you're a paying customer / subscriber that got 'scammed'...
What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something.
I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.
These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it.
eigenspace•3h ago
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.