Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'

https://www.businessinsider.com/mistral-ceo-warns-europe-2-years-avoid-us-ai-dependence-2026-5

by LelouBil • 2 months ago

116 193 2 months ago

businessinsider.com

DivingForGold• 2 months ago

Typical EU response. Seems Europeans have stumbled to 2nd or 3rd place in the A I race, if even that.

imperfectibex• 2 months ago

2nd would be China imho...so 3rd at best

pesacharia• 2 months ago

If you include the UK and Switzerland in Europe then Europe is clearly doing ahead of China.

The 1st and 3rd AI nations in Europe are not in the EU though, so if you restrict it to just the EU it falls well behind china

barbacoa• 2 months ago

America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.

amunozo6• 2 months ago

Always the same ridiculous statement.

poszlem• 2 months ago

I, too, cannot wait when it finally stops being true, so people can stop saying it.

rvz• 2 months ago

Because it is ridiculously true.

sajithdilshan5• 2 months ago

truth hurts right?

rdm_blackhole3• 2 months ago

I mean we are still waiting for the European Apple or Microsoft or Google or anything of that scale aren't we? China has it's own version of all this stuff, where is Europe's?

xyzsparetimexyz4• 2 months ago

If anything the main simplification here is that China is doing a significant amount of innovation too. Otherwise yeah. Europe's main purpose is to serve as a continent-wide historical Disneyland for rich American and Chinese tourists. And maybe we'd be better off admitting that rather than trying to pretend to have any kind of industrial or startup ecosystem.

amunozo6• 2 months ago

A bit dramatic isn't it? I'd rather live in this Disneyland than in a suburban shit hole surrounded by parking lots and obese people.

tensor4• 2 months ago

Immigrants innovate, US declines and isolates, and Europe is waking up to the new world order where the west needs new leadership.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

Two of these are true, but I fear Europe is perpetually incapable of waking up.

amazingamazing• 2 months ago

Deepseek is open source. Whats stopping them from distilling it and releasing their own model today? Where is the reliance on America? Gpus?

mvanbaak• 2 months ago

the problem is not the model, but the infrastructure needed to run the model. so yeah, gpus, cpus, network, etc etc

polski-g2• 2 months ago

Power is 2-3x as expensive in Europe than American. They're toast.

panflute• 2 months ago

Deepseek is open in the sense that you can run V3 or V4 it is not open in the sense that you have all the tools a Chinese company has to make the V5 that will be needed to keep up with the US.

mentalgear2• 2 months ago

Deepseek is open-weight, not open-source afaik.

xyzsparetimexyz4• 2 months ago

Potato potatoe

networked2• 2 months ago

Recent DeepSeek models are MIT and Apache 2.0. You can see the licenses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek#Development_and_relea....

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

CPUs, GPUs, operating systems, programming languages toolchains.

Even if you consider open source, the majority of contributions are from US companies.

There are some companies contributing to GCC and clang from UK, GraalVM and V8 are partially in European sites but from American companies nonetheless.

There is OCaml in France, more no idea.

LelouBil2• 2 months ago

There is VideoLan in France (VLC, x264, DAV1D)

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

Unfortunately Europe is already far behind. OpenAI started over a decade ago. How can Europe catch up? Maybe if progress slows down and they have time to at least get into the same position as Chinese models, but they also need to invest in it. But with what money? And why would talented people stay there instead of going to America where they can get a fairer share of their hard earned money?

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.

polotics2• 2 months ago

The most telling part is when he explains that in order to grant stock options he had to navigate each and every single different legal setup for each one of the member states.

I felt for a while the "European Union" has been turned into a foil for nations that had absolutely no intention to really integrate. Unless actual integration, simple one rule for all on the continent, happens within the next handfuls of months, then this ship's going down and I organize to exit stage left, Trump ain't Xi.

Etheryte• 2 months ago

I don't think this argument holds much water. Each state in the US has their own legislation and taxes and it works just fine.

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

I didn’t understand the “Trump ain’t Xi” part. As in he’s not as bad as the authoritarian nature of the CCP? Or that America is fading and China is a better ally?

orochimaaru• 2 months ago

>>> In a world where you import all your digital services from the United States, you have no leverage over the United States

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.

bruki2• 2 months ago

Comparing AI to resources it highly depends on is a bit far fetched.

Insanity4• 2 months ago

Only somewhat. I’d argue the internet could be considered a basic utility to function in the modern world, yet that just builds on electricity.

thfuran• 2 months ago

Those are all mutually dependent. Turn off the electric grid and close all the roads and see how long municipal water supplies last.

Kye• 2 months ago

What resource isn't interdependent with at least one other resource?

throaway1982342• 2 months ago

Not really. Unless those resources are going to disappear?

delusional• 2 months ago

Because without it your productivity will plummet.

Why would it plummet?

Surely we could just keep doing what we've been doing for the past 50 years. That doesn't go away because AI. The promise of AI is a productivity increase after implementing it. It doesn't change the productivity of not implementing it.

Mallory_Ringess• 2 months ago

It would plummet relative to those using 'AI', not in absolute terms. That in turn would impact your employability compared to those who do use it.

sometimelurker4• 2 months ago

skill atrophy. also AI is actually helpful sometimes, by a very large degree.

Oras2• 2 months ago

and a challenger to OpenAI

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

jstummbillig4• 2 months ago

It seems fairly plausible that they will become useful. I would not consider coding requiring vastly better AI models than the best we have today. The more interesting question is what advantages excess intelligence provides in the future more generally (warfare, system management, etc)

Oras2• 2 months ago

fairly plausible

Based on what? is that a feeling or based on evidence?

olejorgenb• 2 months ago

Their transcription (STT) models are good IMO

sometimelurker4• 2 months ago

... didn't find any of their models remotely useful.

I daily drive Ministral-3-3B-Reasoning, getting a nice 70 tok/s on my GPU. its actually much faster than Google/DDG searches and I use it a ton when coding to check methods and remember ways to implement things. Its better than the qwen stuff of the same size because its not filled with ccp bs.

kkzz99• 2 months ago

because its not filled with ccp bs

You do know that mistral distilled from deepseek, yeah?

tensor4• 2 months ago

Funny, I use them every day and find their models immensely useful. I prefer using technology from democratic countries. And no, I'm not French.

JohnBrookz• 2 months ago

Only mistral could re rerelease deepseeks model and do a worse job.

boomskats• 2 months ago

If we could just do something, anything about being so aggressively colonised by the Palantirs and the neoliberal think tanks and the Christian far-right money, and ISDS-littered trade agreements, then the rest would just follow. Sadly though, I don't think we stand a chance.

Insanity4• 2 months ago

As a European I want mistral and EU to do well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t actually give up my well paid engineering job outside of EU to even entertain working for them in EU. Too low salaries and too high taxes.

scirob• 2 months ago

I wonder why googles biggest European office is in the low tax high salary country of Switzerland

basicoperation• 2 months ago

Zurich is third behind Dublin (definitely for tax reasons) and London.

hobofan• 2 months ago

That's the biggest engineering office, but not the biggest overall European Google office, right? That would be in low tax low salary Ireland.

jstummbillig4• 2 months ago

How do you divorce being a European principally from being willing to pay taxes? What part of being uniquely European do you value that does not fundamentally require taxes?

trinix9124• 2 months ago

So just because someone is born in Europe they should automatically believe that the taxation system is flawless and salaries sufficient?

stavros• 2 months ago

I have to say, I visited Zurich once, and everything was clean, organized, civilized, and pretty. Friends told me taxes are high but you get great education, great healthcare, decent disposable income, and good transportation. If you get laid off, the state continues paying your previous salary for one (two?) years.

If everything is taken care of me from taxes, why do I need money? Take it all.

rdm_blackhole3• 2 months ago

Not OP but to respond to your question, like everything, there is a scale to this question. Would you give to the state 30% of your income to pay for public services? Most people would say yes.

What about 40%? 50%?

Most people agree that taxes need to be paid for the common good of society. However, many people disagree about the correct amount and increasingly about the usage of said taxes.

That is the real problem in my opinion.

radicalbyte9• 2 months ago

The problem with taxes in Europe are that the ultra-wealthy don't pay them. That burden is particularly focused on those who are high wage earners. If I look at my own country, as a high earner I'm paying close to a 50% effective tax rate (a little less with mortgage interest deductions). However the billionaire families who own the beer brewers, shipping companies and agraculture companies are paying well under 0.5% effective. They pay less than in the US. Due to this reason we're one of the most infamous tax dodge countries in Europe, apparently the Swedish and German billionaires have tax residency to avoid paying it.

danielfoster• 2 months ago

Not every EU country has a high tax burden. Rates are generally much fairer in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

So I wouldn’t say high taxes are fundamentally European.

tlogan• 2 months ago

But working in UE gives you much stronger job protection.

So, in a way, you get what you pay for.

rdm_blackhole3• 2 months ago

But that is a the problem though. You get stronger job protection because its very hard to find a job. If you could find a new job quickly and if the job market was more fluid, you would only rarely need this sort of job protection.

Insanity4• 2 months ago

This is a fair point to be honest. But I about 4x’d my take-home salary and get to work on more cutting edge tech, with more impact than in EU.

I did work on some cool medical device and ML tech back in EU, associated with a university and later a start up. But regulation became a PITA.

giacomoforte• 2 months ago

I would become a patriotic European too, but only after our leaders at the national and EU level stop being transatlanticist sellouts... which won't happen any time soon.

collingreen2• 2 months ago

What's a "transatlanticist sellout"?

insane_dreamer2• 2 months ago

you get much more for your taxes than in the US though

Insanity4• 2 months ago

True, I agree. But it does suck working in tech on a “medium” salary when your overseas colleagues do the same work and earn much more.

What I probably miss the most about EU (apart from family) is good food.

poisonborz• 2 months ago

This is a pervasive misconception in the industry, and a very dull trope on HN. Your income tax makes it possible to create a livable society in the EU. You get much more free time and are protected from a lot of random life events, even if you work in a McDonalds counter and not as a software engineer. You have rent, healthcare, protection from landlords. Not perfect, but at least the direction is there.

Solely profit-optimizing free market thinking destroys society and the planet.

marcuschong• 2 months ago

Plus, even if you do prefer the American way (and I could see why), it seems fanatic for people to not recognize the clear benefits of the European model.

pllbnk• 2 months ago

The main brunt of the taxes in percentage terms still falls on the regular employees. Companies and wealthy individuals find ways to avoid them same as everywhere else, hence the feeling of injustice.

verzali4• 2 months ago

Move to Luxembourg then.

benterix• 2 months ago

I'm very happy to pay high taxes in Europe, and enjoy everything that they bring.

mrtksn6• 2 months ago

The only thing that can “save Europe” is US embargo, otherwise doesn’t make sense to do replication of the US effort whatsoever. In US the AI is a private effort, in Europe there are no businesses that are interested in investing such large amounts of money when they can benefit from US made AI. In China they don’t have this option to use the US offerings so they must invest, be it the government or the business that will be protected from US competition.

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.

tjwebbnorfolk3• 2 months ago

The hilarious irony is that Trump has been yelling at Europe since ~2017 to stop being so reliant on the US for everything, to pay more for its own defense, stop regulating and start innovating, etc.

Basically everything that's in the Draghi report.

Meanwhile, EU bureaucrats' heads appear to remain firmly buried in the sand.

mrtksn6• 2 months ago

EU isn’t governed by the china communist party, the only way to stop being reliant to US is to stop trade with US and the cost of it will be enormous. Trump needs to create such a high political risk that the economic damage be justified.

He definitely did a lot to help, but the damage needs to be irreparable so that business can feel safe from US competition. He needs to do do something so outrageous that Germany would not mind losing the US car market for example.

raincole2• 2 months ago

Another hilarious fact: Trump has warned about Nord Stream 2, called it "a tool of coercion."[0] At this point it almost seems like Trump cares Europe more than EU leaders.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50879435

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

The China example was such a massive blunder (from the perspective of US soft power). Like you say, it created a captive market for Chinese chips where Chinese companies might've otherwise bought foreign chips. That's inbuilt demand. But China also has something Europe doesn't and that's central planning. China has realized that chipmaking and AI are issues of national security. Europe just doesn't have that level of governance and forethought. Within 5 years China will be producing their own EUV chips despite the ASML export ban.

And you know who realizes all this? The Nvidia CEO [1][2].

There is now a 70 year history of Europe being designed as and becoming comfortable with being a US vassal state, from the end of WW2 to Bretton-Woods, the Marshall Plan and NATO.

I don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany as changing any of this. If anything, it'll just fracture any semblance of European unity. It'll be the enemy within as those forces will be most aligned with the US.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmHfmrRMUE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo

mrtksn6• 2 months ago

don't see fascist takeovers in the UK, France or Germany

The horseshoe theory is in full swing lately, in UK after right wing libertarian rule came the left wing labour and now it’s once again the right wingers. They again won’t solve anything and more swings will happen until someone realizes that it’s the US trade that isn’t working.

The rest of Europe is similar, they just happen to have more damping as most have fractured parliaments with no one having majority but the general direction change is happening regardless. People aren’t going to be like “tough luck, we choose poorly to rely on US and we will be permanent underclass from now on”.

InTheArena• 2 months ago

Big tech bro CEO Stokes nationalistic fears to justify corporate handouts for his company. Europe is more like America every day.

DiabloD34• 2 months ago

This is mostly a performance by the Mistral CEO.

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.

oytis• 2 months ago

they cannot help you find security exploits.

What is the reason for the recent deluge of CVEs with working exploits to open source projects then?

DiabloD34• 2 months ago

Anthropic repeatedly refuses to show their work.

Is this just a clever application of the harness, so its not inherently LLM at all? Did Anthropic figure out how to take the next step that changes my mind on LLMs? Is this actually just Anthropic committing an interesting case of fraud and using some human labor intensive loop with LLMs? Is this not LLM inference at all, and they're just using only the perplexity measurement on the input code to accelerate where human eyeballs look?

Anthropic refuses to release their model under an accepted open weights license, and that isn't a good sign.

cat_plus_plus2• 2 months ago

You just need to work on your agent design and prompting skills, modern LLMs are crazy good at all the things you listed with the right context and tools.

DiabloD34• 2 months ago

Technically yes, but this has nothing to do with LLMs.

You need to be able to write a good spec period, and this has been true as long as programming has existed. The problem is, LLMs cannot write them themselves, and have trouble reasoning out the unstated parts of complex problems if the spec doesn't spell it out.

Developers familiar with the problem space being worked on, however, can reason out the unstated parts, because the unstated parts are usually the bread and butter of the problem space.

Side note: this is often why LLMs trained on synthetic text perform weirdly or badly... the synthetic text is written by people not familiar with the thousands of individual problem spaces that exist out there, and miss important facts or nuance.

LLMs trained on real text, however, is often done without proper license, and are essentially lossy compressed piracy archives. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

sometimelurker4• 2 months ago

They statistically reproduce text written by other people

explain why they can do multiplication problems they've never seen before? I can give them two 50 digit numbers right now and they'll multiply them. its because they generalize from previous data.

DiabloD34• 2 months ago

That's called a calculator, we already have those.

xyzsparetimexyz4• 2 months ago

Europe is never going to have sovereignty in a lot of areas. A vassal of the US or a vassal of China. Pick your poison.

awestroke2• 2 months ago

If it ever comes to that, we'll pick China, thanks

ejoso2• 2 months ago

So you’d enjoy being like the free and happy people of Tibet then, eh?

bryanrasmussen• 2 months ago

right it totally makes sense because it's the third biggest economy in the world, it has to be a vassal of number one or number two, because there has been a situation where number three in anything tries to move up, if you're third in line you must submit.

radicalbyte9• 2 months ago

A vassal of California. I know we like to say that tech is the US but that's not true. It is almost completely focused around a small part of California. Take that out and Europe and the US are comparable with respect to software tech at least.

Europe has a golden chance with the current mass outflux of talent from the US and I really hope we grasp it. I just don't see my country (NL) doing that as our political class are nearly as stupid as the Americans.

FergusArgyll• 2 months ago

If California would burn down, the scene would recreate itself somewhere else (ny, austin, boston).

sublinear• 2 months ago

This is wildly out of touch. More than half the jobs in software in the USA are not even on the west coast, let alone California.

The broader business world isn't "big tech", but it's still bigger than it.

cedws• 2 months ago

If Europe were smart they’d play both parties against each other.

cat_plus_plus2• 2 months ago

China's AI vassal state. But so far in a good way because it's open source and everyone benefits.

moomoo11• 2 months ago

i always forget EU exists when it comes to tech

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

why is that?

ralph84• 2 months ago

Every time you have to dismiss a cookie banner, thank a European.

trinix9124• 2 months ago

Because most people in the EU outside of the tech field care more about the welfare policies and overall quality of life than some ambitious tech projects of a few random private companies, from which they're unlikely to directly benefit from, especially when those are located outside of their member state.

logicchains2• 2 months ago

Overall quality of life goes down if you just keep cutting up the pie without growing it, especially when you go into debt to buy more pie. The current youth in Europe are the first generation in decades to see worse living standards than their parents; Europeans' disdain for economic growth is already catching up with them.

vasco• 2 months ago

Becoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under?

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.

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

I do believe that due to security concerns, European countries at the state level will try to detach themselves from relying on US infrastructure. Not only AI, but all critical things.

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.

sajithdilshan5• 2 months ago

The important key word in your comment is "will try", they will try, but fail miserably. They have built a wall of bureaucracy to keep them prisoners and even trying to change an infrastructure provider would need cutting 100 red tapes and 5 years. Not to mention, even if they want to switch, that's huge capital investment and that's not something EU can afford given the social economical state they are at the moment.

kingleopold2• 2 months ago

they already lost it but I guess it takes time to acknowledge it? Europe does not have capital or structures to catch up, it can't change in 2 years

vk5tu• 2 months ago

Consider that Boeing once had no European rival.

Europe is bulding consensus on what technology sovereignty means. This is a self-interested statement within that discussion. At some point the EU will appoint at rapporteur to synthesise those viewports into a formal definition. The EC will use that to develop a programme of works which is satisfactory to the member states and other interested states.

The US is often lulled by the seemingly endless discursive nature of pan-European projects to think that they are not serious or effective. And then one day there is an Ariane or Airbus or Galileo.

kingleopold2• 2 months ago

at those time Europe was growing a lot more in real terms and had one of best engineering in the world. Maybe the best cars with mech. engineering was already made at those times, only Japan was rival for cars. No way Europe now have near best AI engineers and teams, huge difference.

trilogic• 2 months ago

A quick search of revenue of google and facebook (in billions) 2015-2020. Is that so hard to understand that there is an entire economy wrapped around AI/IOT? Didn´t Europe learn anything from historic data? Google Facebook 2015 $67.80B* $17.93B Google segment revenue (Alphabet restructuring). Total Alphabet: $74.98B 2016 $81.30B $25.76B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $89.55B 2017 $100.10B $40.65B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $109.46B 2018 $128.90B $55.84B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $136.82B 2019 $143.90B $70.70B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $161.86B 2020 $152.70B $85.97B *Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $182.53B

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?

raincole2• 2 months ago

In other words, "EU governments please give me money."

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.

radicalbyte9• 2 months ago

I'd like to regulate them the way American companies are regulated, and then regulate American companies in Europe the way European companies are regulated. Level the playing field.

Not exactly rocket science, it's just copying the things the Americans (and Chinese) are already doing.

sajithdilshan5• 2 months ago

I think he's asking to cut red tapes than money. EU was the first to regulate AI even without any company in EU producing a frontier model.

radicalbyte9• 2 months ago

I've read the article and I kind of agree with some of the things he's saying. It's more than just AI though. Energy is the big problem and the big problem there is that we're just not ramping up renewables quickly enough. Why? Corruption of course. We had a big leaded 15-20 years ago but the German car manufactorers and British/Dutch oil companies applied a huge amount of political pressure, aided by American interests, which not just slowed the transition but also helped strangle our solar/wind industry. It's not a lost cause though, at EU level they could absolutely make it happen.

sajithdilshan5• 2 months ago

Renewable energy is unreliable without a steady storage capacity and EU would still rely on raw materials for battery production on other countries. Further, regardless of the energy source, what is vital for AI or any other industry is a steady, reliable power source which cannot be provided only through renewables in EU, not only because lack of storage, but also unfavourable geography.

radicalbyte9• 2 months ago

That's only true at the micro level; at the macro level it is surprisingly stable over the EU zone + UK + Norway. There are capacity and interconnect issues but they're small fry. We have a huge amount of capacity for wind and considerable for solar, we just need to get using more of it.

We have one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world in the EU. Where we suffer is in lack of refining capacity. The US are in a similar situation.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

When you take a train ride through Germany you see solar fields and wind farms everywhere. How much will be enough?

enaaem2• 2 months ago

I am sceptical of the AI world dominance race.

The thing is that AI is not winner takes all market. AI models and server space is all fungible. It is very valuable, but no one will hold exclusive AI capabilities in the long run.

georgeburdell• 2 months ago

Agreed. I’ve switched to local models for many of my simpler workloads because they’re good enough. Coding is still through a frontier model though

spwa42• 2 months ago

In the HPC space, it has always been a "winner takes all" market. 90% or more of the business goes to the biggest provider with few exceptions (in terms of dollars, obviously all compute gets used).

And, yeah, quite a bit of that is government having ... suboptimal ... developers who want to run bad code that nobody's allowed to look at. And yes, it is about weapons design, which is why nobody is allowed to look at (and certainly not fix) the code.

I think the idea is that AI will dominate a bunch of industries, from government administration, to intelligence (arguably they have that one already), to software, to insurance, to entertainment (produce 10 new lord of the rings series per day). And the first one to get there will "own" Government administrations, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, ...

If the past 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the first one to have a great popular success wins. Not in one market, on ALL of them.

enaaem2• 2 months ago

Very few governments outside of the US will let a US company "own" them. It is a national security issue. They just take a good enough locally made model.

alecco• 2 months ago

The EU created a € 94 billion fund for exactly this a couple of years ago. And then they put in charge a lawyer who is the daughter of a powerful Spanish media mogul.

I tried registering a couple of years ago, but it required a female co-founder, N employees in the EU, and a laundry list of ridiculous demands unrelated to technology or real startups.

And even the paperwork to start a company in the EU is a PITA. You have to incorporate in Bulgaria or something if you want anything in reasonable times. And good luck with Social Security and tax agencies.

Forget it.

duxup• 2 months ago

They just buckled on tariffs right?

Politically they seem willing…

sometimelurker4• 2 months ago

Europe can totally do this. this is a race about talent, not vram, and Europe has asml + universities; both. if they want to compete they can.

deepseek v1 was "built in a cave with a box of scraps". now that they have actual hardware v4 is huge, but what really matters is talent.

pu_pe• 2 months ago

Mistral's claim to European sovereignty is somewhat weak, because:

- They are partially owned by American companies

- They run their infra on American providers (AWS especially)

- Their models are a distillation and therefore dependent of American and Chinese models

Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'

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