There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.

It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.

Big claim. Apart from Mistral OCR, I didn't find any of their models remotely useful.

They do have a chance to become sole AI provider for France as French are trying to break from US tech, not because their product is useful.

Sounds like a cry to raise more money, which is inline with their initial pitch [0]

[0] https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral

Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money.

It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.

He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has.

LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard.

All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely.

Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.

they’re so hostile to it (lawfare) and have seemingly little innovation comparatively

why is that?

It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.

For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where:

A) They'd become enemies.

B) They could just turn off access.

One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.

Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89 2016 16.88 2017 17.88 2018 18.89 2019 19.31 2020 17.42 Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp. What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?

Not saying that American companies are better in this regard, but if we interpret each CEO's words with the same scrutiny as how we view Elon or Altman's words... that's pretty much it.