Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit (opens in new tab)

My theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral just doesn’t have access to this level of compute or the money to try and muscle their way in.

> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?

Not ruthless enough and no backing by a corrupt govt administration that has no morals but focuses on self-enrichment instead.

Might sound drastic but I think that's actually closer to the truth thn everbody likes to admit.

> My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks.

Exactly.

> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?

All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-...

Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:

1. Money: less diverse private pension fund environment = less LPs to invest in VC funds = less VC dollars to invest in new ventures. European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds. This starves the private sector of capital while inflating the % of GDP driven by government spending every year (government pension funds buying government bonds in circular fashion enable runaway deficit spending...just like circular AI infrastructure spending).

2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.

3. Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).

4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc.

It's not "culture" or Europeans being "lazy" as most people would claim. There's currently thousands of young french people working 80 hour weeks creating dumb consulting powerpoints or legacy investment banking deal memos as we speak. Ambitious people exist everywhere in equal proportion, they're just working on the wrong things.

Europe can't compete in the digital revolution the same way they could compete in the industrial revolution due to various system design choices. Culture is simply the aesthetically observed byproducts of system design.

> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?

Considering all their talk about new DCs and compute, and a few offhand comments, it sounded to me that compute is a big limitation.

Should it, though?

I think an European company, taking Chinese models, perhaps doing its own post-training on them and training the Chinese-ness out, with a great chat service, enterprise API and coding agent, could be pretty valuable in itself.

OpenAI used to make Codex-specific models, but they stopped. What I've gathered from interviews and similar is that training two models isn't worth the (small) lift from having a coding-specific model. You're pre-training on everything anyway, and coding RL is reasonably useful for general-purpose models too.

DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.

Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek

I do think there's a chance open weight models have a bit of a moment with the costs of frontier models growing on business balance sheets. It's unfortunate from my "privacy loving" PoV that it's mostly Chinese models filling the gap. ( the top models on openrouter for instance ).

I have used Mistral models out of pure ideology for web agents and the like which aren't doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I thought distillation meant small models don't have to compete with the big models and can always eventually achieve close parity, but it's just a matter of time to do the distillation? (i.e. how much lag do you want to live with) Am I oversimplifying?

It's all relative. For local use I'd classify it by hardware (VRAM size) using FP8 or Q6 quantization:

1. tiny <2-3B -- easily runnable on lower-spec hardware

2. small 4-8B -- runnable on 8GB GPUs

3. medium 9-12B -- runnable on 12GB GPUs

4. large 13-24B -- runnable on 16GB (for the lower end models) and 24GB GPUs

5. very large 25-32GB -- runnable on 32GB GPUs

6. huge >32GB -- not easily runnable on consumer GPUs without compromising performance (offloading layers to the CPU/RAM), quality (heavy quantization, esp. at <= Q4), or price (investing in multi-GPU setups and/or server-grade hardware).

You could possibly split huge down further, as 70GB models (e.g. llama 3) are easier to get working than >120GB models and 1TB models are completely intractable.

I think machines like the DGX Spark are about to become a lot more common/popular. It’s big enough to run sparse 150-250B MoEs with enough throughout for a single user. Deepseek v4 Flash is #1 (in terms of usage) on OpenRouter because it’s good enough to be useful. You can run it on a Spark (though it runs better across 2, which is getting up there in cost)

channeling Rocky (extraterrestrial) there I see :)

There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.

You don’t think it’s smart to get reliable funding this way? From Banking the Cash Cow?

Devstral is getting better, it’s the Vibe harness that’s holding it back (I think). I can see how that would drive some business as well.

Their chat thingie isn’t very well positioned, but gets results. Could be an euro or two per month, maybe bundled with some more features. It’s not like Mistral has no options, if anything they’re just a bit complacent and not ambitious with their plans.

When the humans have a track record of corruption, it might make sense for a company to seek parallel opinions from a LLM so they can at least flag suspicious human decisions.

Assuming BNP Paribas leadership wants to stop the corruption of course.

The EU has just poured unfathomable amounts of money into continent wide infrastructure (https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resili...) - due to COVID, the military - due to Russia, etc. They can't do everything.

We're talking about enterprise customers. The trivial answer is Mistral has sales teams and consultants from the same company that builds the models and from the EU.

One reason might be that Mistral doesn't have a risk of weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government.

Because the lab working on Mistral is in the European Union.

Please don't run Chinese models for KYC operations.

From what I understood they are retiring a lot of the specialised models in favour of the main family.

The first step would be indeed to join forces with UK, in order to don't be two entities, which is very unnatural to me.

So let me get this straight. You think that Europe "shot itself in the dick" by making it harder to deploy AI that:

- manipulates, including subliminally (hope you'll like your subliminal Ads mixed into your LLM output)

- profiling for social scoring

- automated thread labeling as an individual, with no human supervision

- facetracking databases

- emotional and "well-being" monitoring at work or in schools

- + many other kinds of surveillance tools.

I hope you are joking.

edit:

For context this was a snippet of prohibited use, which the fines listed on Wikipedia (theoretically apply to), https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/5/

You don't compete with anthrophopic from the basement. For that you need either a shit loads of money, or a government which are not afraid of getting very very involved.

There is a lot of Europeans working on AI, it's just that a lot of them work for American companies. Because of money.

Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future, and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.

Way more important than this act are the police raids. Someone used your SaaS to send phishing (see today's front page HN)? They'll just take all your servers away. Goodbye business. Unless they think the general public would riot, so established companies are okay. You can't build a castle on a foundation of quicksand.

Did you read even a summary of the AI Act?

The gist of it is very simple - depending on the risk of what you're doing with AI, you have to document why it did what it did, and be able to explain it; or you can't use it at all. So if you're using AI for mass surveillance, you can't; if you're using it for treating loan applications you need to be able to explain why it approved/denied; if it's a customer service chatbot, do whatever, nobody cares.

Not only is burden of the legislation fairly low (and a lot of it hasn't come into force yet), it is extremely reasonable. No, sorry, we don't want a UnitedHealthcare using a broken algorithm on purpose to deny as much care as possible and hiding behind computer says no.

Well , there isn’t also the opposite take from TechCrunch where they say: Why Paris may be the most important AI city outside Silicon Valley. [0]

While the EU loves its regulation, I still feel it’s too early to write it down in the AI race. It will not replace Anthropic or OpenAI any time soon, but even Google and Meta fail to do that.

If AI continue to grow and expand, there is enough space for many more unicorns.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/why-paris-may-be-the-most-...

It's yet another time when EU is killing our own possibilities to build real competition to US or Chinese tech.

And yet another time they will be thinking aloud in few year "what happened that we are fully dependent on USA?"

So you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?

Le Chat was great, the rebrand to Vibe is meh

Mistral is a startup that happened to raise 100M. I said in my comment a “country backed startup”, which mistral is

There are several payments processing companies that are already largely using AI for customer support queries. They still have an escape hatch to a human but at least one of those companies (on the smaller side) is reporting a ~99% success rate, they are down to a handful of human customer service employees now for cases where the customer can't find/produce the transaction ID.