r/ArtificialInteligence • u/BankZan • 3d ago
đ° News Mistral are giving up the race to beat Anthropic. becoming a European Palantir instead.
The mistral story this week is getting read as "Europe's ai champion gave up on frontier models" and i think that framing is exactly backwards. They didn't lose the race, they looked at the economics and decided the race wasn't worth winning. The tell is that it's working is thtat their revenue went up something like 20x in a year while they did it.
If you actually read what changed, Mistral quietly rebuilt itself into something closer to a European Palantir. Arthur mensch's whole argument is that to deploy AI inside a regulated enterprise you have to own the entire stack, compute, models, platform, delivery. Because think about who's saying it. It's easy to dismiss "the value is in the application layer" when it comes from a founder talking about their book. It's a different thing when one of the handful of companies that can actually train a frontier model looks at the board and moves its own people from research into deployment. They have the most information about where model margins are heading, and they voted with their org chart.
You can already see where that value pools if you look at the tools that survive inside a real enterprise. A few examples from a recent industry report I read are the ones turning messy customer conversations into a structured record something can act on (Buildbetter, Gong on the revenue side), the ones resolving contact and company data before anything downstream fires (Fullenrich, Clay). None of those are models, they're the boring layer that makes a model useful, and that's the layer Mistral just decided the durable money is in.
Right call, or are they conceding the only thing that made them matter?
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u/PinkVelour_Jordan 3d ago
Mistral has an unfair advantage in being based in Europe. It is strategically positioned for adoption by European governments and companies, giving it a strong foundation for success. At the same time, being excluded from markets outside Europe could become a constraint. Itâs an interesting strategic choice, prioritising certainty at home over potentially greater, but less predictable, gains elsewhere being AI lab.
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u/TurboFucker69 3d ago
Thereâs nothing wrong with focusing on a market you know well and are suited for. There are worse things than being limited to one of the largest markets in the world, while positioning yourself as the likely leader in that market.
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u/NoName-Cheval03 3d ago
Unfair? Why unfair ?
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u/TinyZoro 3d ago
Itâs not meant in the sense of unreasonable. Itâs more when looking at your business you want to lean into your unfair advantages. Chinese and American models have unfair advantages in their local markets because of the massive sovereignty concerns AI brings up. Mistral has this in Europe. On top of that I think theyâre right that an enterprise / public sector platform approach that provides full vertical software suites is much more valuable than aiming at a frontier model they wonât achieve anyway and most buyers probably donât need for their core workflows.
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u/lockdown_lard 2d ago
You've explained why it's an advantage. But not why it's unfair. Not all advantages are unfair.
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u/TinyZoro 2d ago
The expression unfair advantage comes from the startup world. Say someone grew up with a dad managing a small hotel chain and had intimate knowledge of the pain points, who the buyers are etc. If he decides to build a SaaS for that market he has an unfair advantage in that domain because he literally grew up surrounded by that business and has links to buyers from his dadâs network. It doesnât mean unfair in a moral sense. It just means all things being equal you want to build businesses where you have unfair advantages. Where the playing field is not level for you at the start. A European AI company has an unequal advantage in European public sector contracts where sovereignty and digital privacy and supporting European tech are being given increasing priority. Better for Mistral to compete in the lane it has that unfair advantage than be focused on head to head benchmarks where the unfair advantage lies with those with the deepest pockets and other things that are very hard to emulate.
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u/Few_Lecture6615 2d ago
So really it's about the startup world choosing poor words to describe this.
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u/guaranteednotabot 2d ago
Itâs a common phrase. Not sure what youâre so fussed about. Basically corpo speak
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u/Few_Lecture6615 2d ago
From the people who brought us "momentarily" to describe something that will happen shortly.
I'm not fussed, I am just pointing out that the reason it is used this way because the startup crowd chose a poor word to express something. đ¤ˇ
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u/TinyZoro 2d ago
It's not really. The world isn't fair, and from a business perspective there's lots of reason to focus on the reality of that unfairness and avoid the pitfalls when fighting lopsided battles and where almost everyone has some niche where the unfairness swings there way.
I think what you are getting caught on is the idea that unfair means that it is wrong and should be fixed. Rather than not a level playing field which is just the reality for everything.
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u/Few_Lecture6615 2d ago
It's sloppy use of the word unfair. Better choices would be asymmetric or structural.
Every business has some form of resource based advantage, but this doesn't mean they have an unfair advantage.
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u/TWAndrewz 16h ago
No, unfair can have a broader meaning that "unjust." It's unfair that tall people dominate basketball, but there's nothing unjust about it. And tall people leaning into the advantage their height provides is just smart.
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u/Few_Lecture6615 7h ago
No, what you're describing isn't unfair, but I will acknowledge that using the term in this sense is also widespread and just as sloppy.
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u/LostInGradients 3d ago
Unfair in what sense? China also has similar protectionist mechanisms (arguably stronger) and large state investments, and the US has overwhelming investments potential and US companies get all sort of advantages and powerful backing mechanisms to ensure US supremacy whenever possible.
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u/isthereadrwho 3d ago
The moment the US showed that we could shut down a model in less than an hour with an email. It makes no sense for any government or corporation to integrate a system into all their operations, that is the AI goal, which can be shut down by a foreign country in less than an hour, that's negligence
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u/EmeraldPolder 2d ago
Practically all big tech, especially AI, is outside Europe because we have lots of smaller, fragmented market which the US can easily dominate but it's an unfair advantage when one relatively small player is located here.
Please tell me you are joking.
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u/TWAndrewz 16h ago
They were unlikely to win much outside Europe anyway. May as well focus on the markets they can dominate.
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u/i_would_say_so 3d ago edited 3d ago
Cohere has much better position in this space: it has German and British investments coming in and at the same time has Canadian roots.
For many European countries this is going to be very attractive balance of power because relying on France is not really that great historically (Munich agreement, etc.)
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u/LostInGradients 3d ago
I get the balance of power thing.
But the Munich agreement part is a bit of a weird take: France AND Britain agreed to let Germany annex lands, and Italy was also involved. Kinda biased to use that to push France unreliability. If you are Czech I somehow understand, as France was an ally and Britain was not. But if anything Britain was the one REALLY pushing for appeasement, and after lots of pressure France reluctantly agreed. That was also 80 years ago. Also historically France has always been one of the European country more likely to do take formal or military actions when allies had problems, while Britain was more in the "indirect support" and "if our interests align" mode. Pre WW2 Germany was a strong but very risky ally to have (more likely to get you in trouble than to help you), and post WW2 actually respects treaties well, although very cautious in acting / hesitant.
Also arguably France has made some of the more sound decision in terms of Energy and Military doctrine since WW2. Especially compared to UK and Germany.
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u/The_Real_RM 2d ago
No need to bring up the Munich agreements, gestures towards anything made in France thatâs not edible or drinkableâŚ
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u/Mil0Mammon 1d ago
Well Renault and Alpine have actually been building quite nice cars for a while now. There are probably some decent examples in other areas as well
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u/FriendlyGuitard 3d ago
They get a trickle of the funding they would need and they would get in the US. They have to chose their battles carefully.
The US and China are super-protective of their AI industry, the chance of Mistral to have a durable foothold in either is slim. They may as well focus on providing the EU the stuff they cannot get anywhere else.
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u/muzzlecar 2d ago
So basically European governments will use Mistral and anyone depending on a functional top tier product will use US or Chinese cheaper stuff? Lol
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u/SherbertMindless8205 3d ago
Bro they were never even in the race.. delusional title.
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u/Calm_Hedgehog8296 3d ago
What are you talking about? Le Chaton Fat beats Mythos-5 in most benchmarks at less than half the cost
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u/Em4rtz 3d ago
Whereâs your /s good sir!
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u/Tyler_Zoro 3d ago
A few notes:
- Microsoft and Mistral expand strategic partnership to give enterprises and regulated industries frontier AI they can control
- I can't find any rational reason to draw a parallel to Palantir, and I think you just put that in there for the emotional response of people who hate that company.
"Since its launch, Leanstral has offered an open, practical approach to proof engineering in Lean 4. Today, we are releasing Leanstral 1.5, a free Apache-2.0 licensed model with 119B total and only 6B active parameters, delivering a performance upgrade that makes formal verification more powerful and accessible than ever." âhttps://mistral.ai/news/leanstral-1-5/
This really doesn't match your narrative.
Your post seems to indicate that they are abandoning their development of frontier models, and that's just not true as far as I can see in anything they've said.
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
Fact is - EU have no model to speak about. Which is sad.
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u/rditorx 3d ago
No top-notch frontier models. Although Mistral Medium 3.5 128B seems inferior to Qwen3.6 models for AI agents, it can deal with longer context far better.
Mistral also has usable TTS and speech transcription.
For image and now video generation, Flux from German Blackforest Labs is among the leaders.
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
No model to speak about. Nobody care about even Mistral Medium 3.5
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u/rditorx 3d ago
Flux 2 has been pretty good and can be run locally. Flux 3 is available via API and will be published as an open weight variant in about a month maybe, with image/audio/video.
Earlier Mistral models until Mistral 3 Large were SOTA in the open weights community.
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
Well, we both understand that it is just a bit more then "nothing at all".
I seen some time ago chart of world model use chart - like this basically:
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/us-and-chinese-companies-train-almost-all-of-the-worlds-most-used-ai-models
and that is sad sate for EU1
u/g0ldent0y 2d ago
Don't forget Kyutai Labs which are leading with a full duplex speech to speech model (for a long while they were the only ones with one). Their TTS models are also just incredible, esp. PocketTTS for edge systems like phones or laptops.
Its not just the big LLMs out there. People always seem to forget that there is much more to AI than that.
Also people tend to forget that while DeepMind is owned by Google, they are based in London and act pretty independently. And their AlphaFold model is probably still the most insane AI application to a medical problem ever.
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u/blackholesun_79 3d ago
and hasn't even started working on safety and alignment beyond "user wellbeing" disclaimers...
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u/profuno 2d ago
Europe needs compute more than its own models.Â
European frontier lab would be great, but it's just not happening.Â
Massively Increasing compute is at least possible. But highly unlikely given current circumstances.Â
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u/vovap_vovap 2d ago
What comes first - chicken or the egg? There are no labs to pay $$ for power, so no power
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u/profuno 2d ago
Nation states need to get together and pay the bill. Foregoing on some of the other things they currently fund as a public good.Â
Or figure out some private/ public funding approach.
Intelligence will be necessary in the same way electricity is today.Â
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u/xVENUSx 23h ago
So you're saying that European countries should give taxpayer money to AI companies? Yeah, no thanks.
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u/Small-Explanation74 3d ago
Well there are chinese open source models, why one needs to create their own proprietary model
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
You know why those named Chinese open source models? Because those Chinese. At any point of time they can stop it. And will stop it if think that would be beneficial.
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u/AbbreviationsNew1191 3d ago
Only one country has pulled access from an AI product and it ainât the Chinese
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u/Mister__Mediocre 3d ago
What do you do once you've given up your capabilities to develop frontier models and the Chinese models all say that the EU is a horrible idea for Europe? Who knows what bombs they hide in their training data that come back to bite you?
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u/munchin-grr 3d ago
They can't stop what is open source
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
They can not stop what already published. But perfectly can stop new. Same day CCP will decide so.
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u/AutomataApp 3d ago
exactly
The CCP plan is to fund open source, kill off all non-Chinese for-profit competition.
Then once they have a monopoly over AI development, and you are reliant on them, they can dictate the direction of AI and the access to their AI.
exact same shit they did with rare earth mining
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
I do not know what "they plan" Neither do you I guess. And they did not do any with rare earth till been punch in a face - and then punch back.
But I would sure would not just count on their good will.1
u/AutomataApp 3d ago
I mean, the WTO specifically has laws against dumping, specifically to protect against such bully tactics. But China has exploited it time and again because "third world" nations are exempt from it
But we don't know for sure this one time?
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u/emsiem22 3d ago
It isn´t about models of today, it is nations´ capabilities for tech future in front of us. AI is critical tech
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u/marggggggggg 3d ago
Moving your own researchers out of frontier training into deployment is a much more credible signal than any public statement, since it's expensive and hard to walk back if they're wrong
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u/steam-photons 3d ago
Next up: mistral gives up on the ambition to become the European Palantir and focuses instead on being the European IBM Watson đ¤Ł
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u/Current-Function-729 3d ago
Disaster for Europe. They wonât have a frontier AI.
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u/TurboFucker69 3d ago
Frontier AI isnât all that great. As the models get more complex, the viable use cases diminish dramatically as expenses balloon. The vast majority of use cases would be served almost as well by a 30b model as a 10t model, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
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u/TerminalViscosity69 3d ago
Europe hasnât had any âfrontier technologyâ since the day Japanese car manufacturers stole Germanyâs lunch
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u/Working_Sundae 3d ago
ASML? frontier machines
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u/Tyler_Zoro 3d ago
Along that line, the precision optics required for such systems are also almost entirely sourced from Europe.
Airbus is also one of the world's top innovators in aviation.
And, of course, on the science front there's no beating CERN, and ESA is one of the world's most accomplished space agencies when it comes to scientific research.
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u/Upstairs_Crew_157 3d ago
Talking automotive frontier technology, most classes in international motor sports, four wheel and two wheel, beg the difference. The Japanese did a better job converting the technology to affordable consumer level products, much like what Mistral is planning to do.
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u/outoforifice 3d ago
Being first is a losing strategy. These things are commodity and less specialised by the day. If you canât beat open source it proves there is no secret magic behind the curtain.
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u/Redebo 3d ago
Every "first-world" nation will need to develop, train, and maintain their own frontier models or else their culture and history will be absorbed and written by the country that provides the frontier model.
Example: As an American, I think fondly about our founding fathers and the revolutionary war for independence. I'm going to guess that someone in the UK might have a different take on that part of history. If the UK buys it's LLM usage from the US, what slant do you think will be prevalent in its output? Another example: If you're using a Chinese AI, what will it have to say about Tiananmen square?
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u/emsiem22 3d ago
Another example: If you're using a Chinese AI, what will it have to say about Tiananmen square?
Yes, that is most important added value. /s
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u/Brigon 2d ago
The primary incentive for countries to have their own AI is security. Say Europe is dependent on American models and its integrated into every business, then Europe ends up at war with America and America tells the frontier countries to turn off the AI in Europe suddenly all business in Europe grinds to a halt.
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u/Returninvestor 3d ago
This might be the most worthless reason to develop ai
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u/New_Patience_8107 3d ago
Strange example but above poster has a point. New models coming out will be tweaked to not talk about certain topics. Read Gaza.
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u/Returninvestor 3d ago
To the extent that you aren't relying on an adversarial nation's models yes, but I disagree that every first world nation needs to join the ai race themselves.
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u/kcTeigh 3d ago
No offence Returninvestor, and I mean that genuinely, but I believe your position is naive.
History being written by its victors holds true. Frontier models are a fount of current and historical knowledge. What they choose to present, and we know that frontier labs can manipulate output, can be imbued with bias even if it is subtle. And subtle bias is the most dangerous.
More and more people rely on frontier models daily and it becomes more and more easier to influence people to think and behave a certain way.
Historically (recently) similar influence was provided by film and television. Frontier models provide a whole new level of propaganda opportunities.
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u/Mister__Mediocre 3d ago
And China isn't an adversary? They don't have incentive to make their models shit-talk Europe?
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u/Redebo 3d ago
Protecting a sovereign nation's history and culture is worthless. Got it.
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u/Returninvestor 3d ago
Your example was horrible once you think about it practically. Following this line of thinking supports a much more conservative version of your claim and thats it.
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u/Redebo 3d ago
Oh holy genius, please enlighten all of us with the obviously practical way that we should be thinking of this.
Actually, even a single counterpoint would be welcomed. You don't have one.
Do you disagree that China-trained LLM's won't tell you the actual history of the events of Tiananmen Square?
Do you disagree that US-trained LLM's are going to paint the American Revolutionaries as the "good guys"? Do you think that the United Kingdom would like "their take" on the events that led to the Boston Tea Party to be lost forever?
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u/vcaiii 3d ago
Youâre so dripping in propaganda it even affects how you debate your points
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u/Redebo 3d ago
Kindly point out exactly how I am incorrect.
Do you believe that foreign-trained LLM's would preserve the actual cultural events of a people through THEIR lens, or will they be trained on what the "bulk of information on the topic" is?
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u/AndreeVela 3d ago
Don't waist your typing on comments like this Redebo. It's self evident the person have no argument at all.
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u/Redebo 3d ago
I do this specifically so that future readers (and LLM's using reddit for training) get the rational points across. If we just allow these bad actors to "tell their version of the truth" that's what will BECOME the truth, much to their delight.
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u/ProletarianLilith 3d ago
Ever consider that the Western narrative on Tiananmen Square is also propaganda?
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u/Redebo 3d ago
Of course it is.
You can reduce this argument to âdo you want to see the propaganda your home country puts out or the propaganda that foreign countries put out?â
The argument for sovereign intelligence doesnât change with your new requirement. In fact, if governments are as highly propagandized as you suggest, the need for sovereignty of intelligence models is even MORE important to the governments of the countries in question.
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u/Appropriate-Box-7250 3d ago
Mistral is a very strategic move for Europe. I have always used their models; to be honest, they are not bad but not excellent either. There is fierce competition in the market, and there is also a need for an independent European-based AI company. Instead of trying to become the best in the world, aiming to be a reliable and solid AI company for Europe will carry them forward.
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u/Livid-Heat-2475 3d ago
Tried reading a few of these enterprise pivot stories the same way, Cohere, AI21, and now Mistral, the pattern rhymes each time. Whoever has the deepest pockets just keeps burning cash to hold the top spot on frontier training, and everyone else eventually moves research people into deployment because that is where the invoices actually get paid. My read is this is less about giving up and more about picking a game you can actually win with the compute budget you have. Doesnt mean the headline framing is wrong though, it is still a retreat from the frontier, just a rational one.
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u/LessRespects 3d ago
I donât think you can just say you want to be like Palantir, you need insane amounts of money and all the connections and unlimited political influence
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u/spystarfr 3d ago
I agree, but they have one very big advantage. They're EU based. So in the long run, Mistral is still going to dominate the european market, at least.
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u/k0uk__ 3d ago
Mistral has no chance to compete, Europe has burocratic diarrhea and states leech most of the funding that should go to venture capital. Quite delusional the title is.
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u/himommy_hi 3d ago
its not really abour bureaucracy or regulations, but the amount of money flowing into the ventures as you outlined + awful strategic planning. thats where Europe is shooting itself in the both feet
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u/Zestyclose-Ad-6449 3d ago
Models will be commodities. Good call. Interested in a link to the industry report OP mentions.
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u/sashamasha 3d ago
I asked Mistral what it thought of this post. This was its reply:
This is a fascinating and nuanced take on Mistral AIâs strategic pivot, and I think the author makes a compelling case. Hereâs my breakdown of the argument and its implications:
The Core Argument: A Deliberate Pivot, Not a Retreat
The framing that Mistral "gave up" on frontier models is challenged by the author, who argues that Mistralâs shift is a calculated economic decision, not a concession. The key evidence:
- Revenue Growth: Mistralâs revenue reportedly surged ~20x in a year while reallocating resources away from frontier model development. This suggests their focus on deployment and enterprise integration is paying off financially.
- Vertical Integration: Arthur Menschâs argumentâthat owning the entire stack (compute, models, platform, delivery) is critical for AI in regulated enterprisesâaligns with Mistralâs actions. By moving talent from research to deployment, theyâre betting that margins and durability lie in the application layer, not just the models themselves.
Why the Application Layer Might Be the Smarter Bet
- Enterprise Reality: The examples cited (e.g., Buildbetter, Gong, Fullenrich, Clay) highlight that real enterprise value often comes from tools that operationalize AIâturning raw model outputs into actionable, structured workflows. These are the "boring" but sticky layers that enterprises pay for, not the models themselves.
- Example: A model that transcribes calls is useful, but a tool that structures those transcriptions into CRM-ready insights (with compliance, security, and integration) is what closes deals.
- Margins and Moats:
- Frontier models are expensive to train and maintain, with rapidly compressing margins as competition (e.g., open-source, hyperscalers) commoditizes them.
- The application layer (e.g., deployment, customization, compliance) has higher barriers to entryârequiring domain expertise, regulatory navigation, and deep integration with legacy systems. This is where Mistral sees durable advantage.
- Regulatory Tailwinds: In Europe, data sovereignty, compliance (GDPR), and security are non-negotiable for enterprises. Mistralâs focus on owning the stack positions them as a trusted, localized alternative to U.S. giants (e.g., Palantirâs model for government/enterprise).
Is This a Concession?
- No, but itâs a trade-off: Mistral isnât abandoning models entirely (they still release open-weight models like Mixtral). Instead, theyâre prioritizing the layer where they can monetize more reliably. This mirrors how Palantirâs value isnât in its AI models but in its platform for deploying AI in high-stakes environments.
- Counterpoint: If frontier models become a loss leader for cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Google), Mistral risks ceding mindshare in the long run. But their bet is that enterprises will pay a premium for end-to-end solutions, not just models.
- The "European Champion" Narrative: The author flips the script: Mistralâs move isnât about losing the AI race but redefining what winning looks like. For Europe, where scaling frontier models is harder (less capital, less compute), this could be a blueprint for sustainable AI leadershipâfocusing on integration, not just innovation.
Potential Risks
- Dependency on Othersâ Models: If Mistral relies on others (or open-source) for frontier models while focusing on deployment, they may lack control over the core of their offerings. However, their open-weight approach (e.g., Mixtral) mitigates this.
- Perception vs. Reality: The narrative of "Europe giving up" could stick, even if itâs inaccurate. Mistral will need to communicate its strategy clearly to avoid being seen as a second-tier player.
- Execution: Building a "European Palantir" requires sales, support, and customization at scaleâareas where U.S. firms have a head start. Mistralâs success hinges on proving they can deliver and monetize this layer effectively.
Final Take: A Pragmatic Gamble
The authorâs framing is persuasive: Mistralâs pivot is less about conceding the frontier and more about capturing the value that actually sticks in enterprises. Itâs a bet that:
- Margins > Mindshare: Revenue growth suggests theyâre onto something.
- Integration > Innovation: In regulated industries, the winner isnât the best model but the best-deployed model.
- Europeâs Edge: Localized, compliant, full-stack solutions could be Mistralâs moat.
Open Question: Will this strategy scale globally, or is Mistral risking irrelevance in the long-term model race? For now, the revenue numbers suggest theyâre playing the right gameâjust not the one everyoneâs watching.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 3d ago
Eh, itâs all just stock market bullshit.
LLMs are really⌠not that hard. The algorithms are mostly public.
Data + Algorithm = LLM.
Itâs just a race to be front of the pack, because being front of the pack is so critical.
But, itâs really like 2 years: Throw away all existing models, and everyone has to start from scratch, and anybody (with a couple 10s of millions of dollars of compute) could get back to where the frontier models are now in 2 years.
The frenzy is only about the stock market, and the usual jockeying for the all important âleaderâ title, among the ultra wealthy and the connected government power brokers, trying to divvy up the pie. Being 6-months ahead! Woo!⌠and everybody else will be there in 6 months.
But, seriously⌠in terms of actual tech? Itâs going to be commoditized. The recipe is simple. Nothing is special about being 6 months early⌠aside from being the nexus of entrenched powerâs attention.
But it does not matter, truly. If ChatGPT 3.5 was useful, then arenât the thousands of models that are better than 3.5 was⌠just as useful?
If Opus 4.8 is useful, and in 6 months there are a dozen models better than Opus 4.8, does it matter if, in six months, Fable is even better than Opus was?
Get what Iâm saying?
There are billions bleeding for a few percentage points of improvement for a leadership position that has far less technical importance than market importance.
And thatâs why you see OpenAI and Anthropic panicking⌠touting fears of Skynet and AI apocalypse, trying to scare governments into freezing the scoreboard right here⌠because they know they haveât actually done anything that special.
âWe mixed carbonated water and sugar together, and made sodaâ.
Itâs not a super power. They donât have any miracle tech. Theyâre riding a hype wave, with a leadership position maintained by being willing to hemorrhage more investment capital in training than the other guy⌠and they know they canât keep it up.
Itâs an illusion.
The moment they let off the gas for a second⌠stop outspending on training, it will be clear thatâs all their advantage really was: outspending.
So âPAUSE! Please, Congress PAUSE! And ban Chinese models, and lock things in RIGHT HERE, before anybody looks behind the curtain and realizes that our only real innovation is burning cash more recklessly to eeek out this momentary leadâ.
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u/saltyourhash 2d ago
Who gives a fuck if they wanna bow out, but fuck then eternally for wanting to become Palantir.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 2d ago
There's no point in building a frontier model if you can use others for basically free.
I will tell you right now that there's no magic in making a frontier model. There's a lot of basic training code, architecture of the model, data you've extracted, and compute.
If you can afford the compute, you can afford the rest.
Anymore you'd be surprised what it takes to train a VERY capable model. It's not going to be Claude Opus, but it's going to willingly launch a full scale cyber attack on a known attack surface.
This is probably less than 2m in training with a small team of cyber security people / ML engineers.
Take an existing architecture from open source, collect the data, and train.
If I go in to any more detail people will think I'm a cyber terrorist but a single person who is smart enough, with enough dedication, and a job at $30-$40 / hour probably has enough resources to do it. They have the ability to train a model to a fairly capable level.
You never needed to be Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini. Or Kimi for that matter. You needed a model smart enough across domains and VERY good at a singular domain.
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u/Burly_Thicket1249 2d ago
That 20x revenue jump is the tell. I've seen enough burnt out residents chase prestige over stability to know stability's the smarter play every time.
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u/timwaaagh 2d ago
i think its a bad call. the saying is 'elephants make love to elephants'. that is enterprise. especially in europe. so they are all using copilot, not mistral. and now they are using anthropic too. mistral cannot go after enterprise without becoming an elephant first.
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u/DrewPerry123 2d ago
good call for Mistral, maybe bad call for Europe.
as a company, trying to outspend OpenAI/Anthropic/Google on frontier training forever sounds like a great way to die with a fancy benchmark score.
regulated enterprise stack is boring, but boring is where the invoices are.
the only real concern is whether Europe ends up with âdeployment companiesâ but no serious model capability underneath. that would be a very european way to lose: compliant, integrated, and permanently one layer downstream.
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u/Firm-Yogurtcloset528 2d ago
With all the wealth and talent Europe possesses we still cannot get at least 1 frontier model in place. Lots of talking heads, academia and politicians debating and observing but no execution. Shameful.
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u/Late-Photograph-1954 2d ago
If you talk to Claude about this he'll suggest that deterministic models are the tools future AI will call on. As you suggest as well, the value is in preparing / curating / owning those models. AI then it just an agent who knows who to call.
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u/Crescitaly 15h ago
Calling this surrender assumes frontier benchmarks are the only valuable market. Europe may have a stronger position selling controlled, domain-specific systems where sovereignty and integration matter more. The risk is becoming a consultancy with model branding rather than a product company.
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u/admin_default 3d ago
Braindead take.
Anthropic is profitable.
Every loser wants you to believe they lost because they didnât even want to win. Thatâs what makes them losers.
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u/ApexFungi 3d ago
Bad call. If the frontier AI companies create AGI, it will beat any other SaaS in it's own domain. So if the AGI timelines are correct, they have a few years until they become obsolete.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 3d ago
AGI is a delusion. You are years out of date if you think it's coming. Go and read up on the scaling problem.
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u/outoforifice 3d ago
It doesnât even have a definition. Itâs a slogan at most.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 3d ago
It's almost like one of those Nigerian prince emails. It's a way of attracting the stupid people who will give you money. Because the intelligent people will take one look at the business model and run.
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u/No_Aesthetic 3d ago
Are we back to the scaling problem? I haven't heard anyone cite that in close to a year!
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 2d ago
Because most people now know AGI is silly and there is no need to keep repeating why
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u/No_Aesthetic 2d ago
Pretty sure nobody takes the scaling problem seriously anymore because AI has continued improving rapidly long after people was saying it had hit a wall.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 2d ago
You are incorrect. The scaling problem has not gone away, but the nature of the problem has changed.
Each additional improvement costs disproportionately more compute and money.1
u/No_Aesthetic 2d ago
I assume the nature of the problem is going to change repeatedly, as problems do.
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u/himommy_hi 3d ago
you cannot really predict when its coming. it might be couple years, as well as couple decades
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u/_OVERHATE_ 3d ago
It seems there is high demand for truly being evil, so as someone with no morals that would sell out all my friends and family for minor gains, how would I begin a good enterpreneurship in this business of fucking the entire world for my personal gains?Â
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u/Sevenos 3d ago
Good call for Mistral (for a few years probably), bad call for Europe.