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.
There's probably a very good business to be made of bringing close to frontier knowledge and finetuning recipes and infrastructure to enterprises that cannot hire that talent. But that's largely not a business that is going to be of a lot of interest to technologists as consumers.
Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
They still use US clouds that can have information pulled by the US government.
> So Mistral is developing its own data centers, starting with one outside Paris. Mensch projects it will have 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027. Power from France’s state-owned nuclear plants will help, but the buildout could still cost an estimated $5 billion. Mensch tapped oil-rich Abu Dhabi and reportedly sought debt financing to help pay for it.
Though to your point it won't be running until 2027.
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.
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.
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
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'...
> Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background
Sounds like this is a scheme against customers that GP fell for.
Are you claiming for the following months that you paid they denied access? That would be against laws afaik
These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations.
Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
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.
Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.
...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
I think these kind of special use cases matter a lot for people who want to build special software. Voice for example is not yet that uniformly accessible as LLMs. So once you chose one provider you're more tighty coupled. Plus, handling voice is more sensitive by nature, so guess at least for European companies building something with voice, Mistral is the go-to company now.
Also, running voxtral yourself is not that straight forward as of now, so relying on their inference makes sense.
The US may have the best AI weapons, but it won't be able to sell them to anyone, so it won't make money needed to keep paying for the AI weapons. Meanwhile the rest of the West will rely on Mistral for its cyber weapons.
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.
Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it.
Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?
> actually in the 2nd
The mixup is easily explainable: machines write numbers in binary notation!
I tried Mistral Vibe (Claude Code equivalent) free tier for a week. I hit web_search limits but not limits for devstral-2. For a working mode where you watch it closely (same way I use Claude Code), it is fine.
Namely, classic web (noscript/basic (x)html), or a dynamic web API with some public tokens? (using a set of CURL commands). If there is a requirement of account creation (often required to generate web API tokens), can I do that using the classic web (noscript/basic (x)html)? And if so, if the account creation does require an email address, do they support self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS, namely email addresses with IPv[46] literals?
We don't have money, but we have the best puns.
-- The French, probably
Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote:
"At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”"
This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts.
[1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht...
[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...
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.
Devstral Small 2 was (and remains) a particularly strong small coding model, even beating larger open weights. Mistral's "problem" is marketing; other providers ship model updates constantly so they remain in the news and seem like they're "beating" the competition. And it works: people get emotionally attached to brands and models, deciding who's better in the court of popular opinion, and that drives their choices (& dollars).
See: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
See some of the test results, it’s horrifying
Devstral Small 2 however just works, for the most part. Qwen3.6 27B can probably handle more complex tasks (when i asked it as a test to write a function that checks for collision between two AABBs in C and gave it a tool to call Python code for confirmation, it actually wrote a Python script that writes C code with the tests, then calls GCC to compile the C code and runs the binary to run the tests, which is something Mistral's small models couldn't do) but i always felt i can just leave DS2 doing stuff in the background (or when i'm doing something else) and it'll produce something relatively useful whereas the little time i spent with Qwen3.6 27B it felt more "unstable" (and much slower, both because of literally slower inference and because of endless reams of text).
Recently i also started using Ministral 3B and 14B - these can do some reasoning too and for very simple stuff Ministral 3B is very fast (i actually didn't expect a 3B model to be anything more than novelty) and have some vision abilities (though they're quite mediocre at vision so i haven't found much use for this - passing something via GLM-OCR to extract all text and feed it to another model feels more practical).
Also as i wrote in another comment, every Mistral model i've tried never questioned me, which i certainly prefer
I think you'll find that ML now pretty much IS the HPC market, there's no distinction anymore. And the HPC market has always had the "being #1 gets you 99% of all business", even if #2 is only 10% behind SOTA.
Given what it's used for (ie. military applications, incl. nuclear weapons, but also rocket designs, flight planning, large-scale simulations), this is probably justifiable: part of it is states keeping in mind what the second prize in a war is worth ...
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
The thing with Anthropic and the military was about whether vendors can tell the military what operations it's permitted to do. It has no bearing on the commercial sector, and isn't actually about AI.
The thing with NVIDIA cards is a continuation of how we've restricted tech exports for quite a while. You can find old news articles about game consoles being export-restricted over nuclear proliferation concerns. This AI-related one was about whether or not custom AI models are relevant to national security, and whether restricting graphics card sales can have a meaningful impact on them.
Any issue with selling chat tokens internationally would be more akin to the recent tariff shenanigans.
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
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.
In particular, the framework under which European companies can transfer data to US companies at all is beyond fragile.
Well, you're pointing out a dissonance in a common AI (stock) booster argument: What if the hardware has lasting power?
If it does, then a company like Mistral can buy their capacity once from Nvidia (as in, once for each unit of capacity), then use it for a sustainable amount of time. No one forces them to scale beyond what's useful to the company and a mature user base. Provider dependence fades over time. That's a problem with Nvidia's current valuation.
If hardware doesn't last over that time, then the amount of cash invested in data center hardware can't really be reconciled with the expected revenue of running them at scale, and these projects are bound to run at a deficit over too long for them to be sustainable. That's a problem with Nvidia's valuation.
With independence as a target, Mistral can pretty safely bet on the former scenario, and then prepare for a future with either a mature market of diversified hardware providers, or innovations in quality and capacity for hardware they already have.
It's not a purity test. Relying on US chips in not the same deal-breaker for all but the most extreme situation as relying on a poorly regulated US company to run the inference.
Has this happened already or is it just conceptually possible?
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.
Some of the use may be legal requirement, some is sponsored (as I would expect French government to do, to some extent EU), some are simply moral moves from >95% of the mankind not living in US who watch the news at least a bit. US isn't that big in many regards and its actively harming its reputation daily to the point there is little left.
That's why this talk of independence is unrealistic.
There is no absolute "most value" though. What’s true in a world were betting on the least worst horse like world empire of the day doesn’t necessarily fit when it global order accelerate transition to multipolar geopolitics boosted on nationalist steroids.
Exactly..
What happens when the capability of American models far exceeds the capability of non-American models? Wouldn't companies using American models have a huge advantage?
Also, OpenAI and Anthropic will just open EU offices and subsidiaries.
The main point should not be the hardware or software itself, because these are just tools that can eventually be obtained. The real issue is development and its cost. US companies now have to cover substantial capital requirements for developing entirely new business models, capital that would likely never be accumulated in Europe. In the past, they competed globally, but in a more fragmented world this is no longer the case. As a result, the risk associated with such investments is higher because potential reward is smaller.
Mistral does not have to compete in the same way. It lacks both the ability and the intention to fight on the global stage against Silicon Valley capital. Instead, it can wait for the industry to stabilize and for business models to mature, then adopt them.
Over time, there will be standardized ways to train models to a certain quality, and key technologies will become less opaque. This is already happening. A similar pattern occurred in Europe with hosting services, for example Hetzner.
Mistral is not playing the same game. It is also unlikely that US attitudes toward Europe will change significantly even with a different administration, that Russia will stop trying to undermine the EU, or that China will become a fair and friendly player. All of this supports the case for local providers of critical infrastructure, which benefits companies like Mistral or similar European counterparts.
This is a pretty naive and innocent take. There is good reasons to why customers might continue to find value in Mistral A.I.
(1) - There is no particular reason why "European" model should be worst than "Chinese" one. GDPR restrictions are not such a big deal and have been made lighter recently [1]. And contrary to China, Europe is not under hardware embargo.
(2) - Most domains are not software engineering and do not need ultra advanced and extremely large models with complex agent setup to reach their optimum in term of A.I usage.
(3) - At the opposite, there is pretty good reasons why companies would want to use European operators with the current geopolitical context (e.g Cloud Act, Risk of data leaks, Regulations, Taxes, Reputation, Geo-political risk, ...).
[1]: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/digital-packag...
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.
This is the same Europe that is gladly mandating age verification for citizens accessing online services, and that is made up of countries that routinely censor speech. There's also a variety of values that make up pan-European politics, both from a national and ideological perspective, that could make these efforts fracture.
If the idea is to not be subject to foreign pressure, maybe there's a short-term argument to be made for this, but like you say, they'll still be vulnerable to hardware imports, which is arguably the main vulnerability.
If the idea is to protect human rights on the continent, this does nothing.
How could I have possibly scammed them by providing them money while not availing of the service?
If the Americans who disagree with Trump are indeed the majority like they claim, this distraction only needs to last until the midterms.
Though cards could if a provider has poor opsec. But I see no particular reason to worry about that either.
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.
Well, ASML's EUV light sources are based on licensed US IP from Sandia Labs, and manufactured in the US by CYMER, which ASML bought, but they still operate and manufacture out of California, so the EU is not sovereign/independent here (neither is any country).
This doesn't mean much anyway, since despite ASML being European, their machines all go to export and EU doesn't put any of those machine to good use domestically, with the most cutting edge semiconductor fabs on EU soil being the Germany based TSMC fabs on the much older 16 and 12nm nodes, far bigger than the 3nm that Taiwan and US operate domestically.
If you go out of your way to make your computing environment weird, don't be surprised when things don't work for you.
There is nothing more sane than trying to fix that. This is a complex matter, and those guys are pure evil with their 'computing environments", won't going to be easy, I guess you may be one of them, or a one of their brain washed soldiers, or here an AI bot. Because, many fresh and young guys in the field are just getting scre... as f... with their washed super clean brain (in academics, those "teachers" who would not be even there without those toxic 'computing environments', yep, this toxicity is their bread and butter, it is a problem).
A lot of money is being channelled in those scams, I guess this is their primary reason to force them onto people. Once you get a simple, but good enough to the job, and stable in time alternative technical apparatus, toxicity levels go back to something bearable, namely their absurd and grotestely complex for no good reasons "computing environment" is just, gone. That said, it is more about control than money, because "big money" follows "control" almost mechanically.
Those guys look like near real mafias (often with big investment funds behind them, like vanguard and blackrock for instance). I just discovered, that here, they literaly dictate their will to our presidents and prime ministers which they used as carpets (they are getting clean brain washed or maybe they are deep into some '$$$' schemes). The rabbit hole seems to be going reaaaally deep.
So for mistral, where are the public tokens to be used with a properly documented web API? I could generate some tokens, using a mistral account, which I should be able to create with a classic web browser (noscript/basic (x)html), and if required with my self-hosted email server on IPv6 without DNS, namely email addresses with ipv6 literals which are stronger than SPF since you drop all emails which ipv6 addresses from the email addresses of the envelop and/or the header do not match. It could be some documented simple network protocol to interact with their inference service. And we all know, those protocols should be stripped to the simplest as possible, because with an online service most of the work does happen in keeping it safe and available, and their 'computing environment' complexity is making that mechanically a pain, this is common sense.
As I said, if you are one of them, namely not being one of their brain washed soldiers aka one of the evil ones, this is pointless to argument anything.
Thats true right up until you’re working with confidential info in a corporate context. Then it’s a multi month cross discipline cross jurisdiction project not an edit in a config file.
All data stays on computers that you control.
Same API. Localhost.
There's also Israel but that's getting into a whole thing that I don't want to sh*t the thread up with.
Meanwhile Devstral Small 2 just answers the damn question.
I don't want to have to convince my computer to do what i want it to do, i want from it to do what i ask it to.
Don't you think there's usually a good reason for this? Whenever this happened to me, the problem was my ignorance.
I can't say if it is a good reason in general, perhaps it is, but it certainly is something i personally find annoying. I think answers should provide an answer to the question asked and then, after that answer was given, they could also give pointers for whatever they consider a better approach and why - this is important, IMO, for a public forum where people of all backgrounds and goals can read the same stuff.
But either way, LLMs IMO should do/provide what they are asked without trying to second guess the user (or at least, there should be LLMs that act like that).
For example, if China looks at the chaos that has been Russia attempting to take Ukraine and the USA attempting to control Iran and thinks "Amateurs" right before doing the same to Taiwan, the GPU supply takes a massive dive. And if North Korea goes after South Korea, RAM gets even harder to buy.
And if the EU says no more ASML sales outside the EU, that delays factories outside the EU by a few more years than they'd otherwise take.
But in the other direction, if NVIDIA's only thing is IP, and the IP is tied to a nation which thinks everyone else on the planet is hostile, that IP may not get protected very well. Right now this is unthinkable, but 5 months ago so was Trump threatening force to take Greenland.
For stuff like these examples, oh yes it can separate. It would be painful to replace, but even supply chain destruction (i.e. even if substitution isn't ready to replace the severed connections) is absolutely a possibility - to think otherwise is the mistake Russia made about its supply of fuel to the EU allowing it to take Ukraine without consequence.
Right now, the EU is looking at Trump and thinking he's arrogant enough to try military action against us. Canada and Mexico are hopefully making similar plans.
But even without Trump, we can't trust China not to call Taiwan's bluff on using TSMC as a hostage against being invaded, nor against the North/South Korean conflict resuming.
This is hilarious. This reminds me of Soviet propaganda. "No, there was no Chernobyl disaster. Please disregard the corpses. Yes, the centrally-planned economy is doing fantastically, better than expected. Reports of famines and shortages are imperialist propaganda."
(Mind you, the Soviets are not alone here, but the blatant chutzpah of Soviet propaganda is perhaps more conspicuous to the Western eye than the Western varieties of PR and psychological manipulation.)
Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...
How many people were punished for Enron? For the subprime crisis? Etc.
In the US, you just give a little money for the president's ballroom and you are pardoned. Or you settle out of court because your justice system is crap.
Interestingly the chief accountant of Enron ended up getting a job in Europe after he got out of prison.
So yes, such companies exist and plenty of people see their existence as a good thing rather then something to mock.
Plenty of corporations are willing to break the rules, but never for free.
This is a weird hill to die on because it's not true. I can't find anything to support your world view and if anything evidence points to the contrary. Europe has a deliberately more complex legal framework, usually in the hopes of keeping out foreign competition (although it's dubious whether or not that actually works).
1. the 2018 CLOUD Act mandates US companies — and their subsidiaries — to provide information to the US government on demand, regardless of where the data is stored
2. FISA secret courts prevent companies from even saying they where summoned, or telling anyone who or what the case was about (including canaries).
So you won't ever know if your data was handed over to the US government.
The purpose of the CLOUD Act was to get at data that was stored outside the US but that was "in the custody, control, or possession of communications-service providers that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States".
It arose from a situation where an email provider in the US used cloud storage services in several countries to store emails. They were asked for the email of a particular customer and said they did not have to provide it because they had happened to store that customer's mail at a non-US cloud provider.
What the CLOUD Act requires is that:
> A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall comply with the obligations of this chapter to preserve, backup, or disclose the contents of a wire or electronic communication and any record or other information pertaining to a customer or subscriber within such provider's possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.
A company incorporated in the EU, even if it is owned by an entity in the US, is not subject to US jurisdiction and so that does not apply. The US owner is subject to US jurisdiction but the data of EU customers of the EU company is not in the US owner's possession, custody, or control.
No? Certainly sounds like it is in the US owner's control to me.
But even disregarding that fact. Given that the US government also started hiding what it was doing with FISA courts and forbidding that anyone, including the companies themselves, checks what actually happens ... do you think anyone will believe this? We HAD evidence of US companies refusing to hand over data before CLOUD and FISA, we do not see that anymore. (And that's before we start taking into account more some recent administration's respect for ...)
Of course this is also pretty hypocritical since EU countries have been caught more than once capturing communications of non-citizens. The problem that usually gets mentioned: the Boeing - Airbus fight wasn't a one sided US being untrustworthy to help Boeing.
Incorrect, this is EXACTLY the scenario that the Cloud Act was introduced to to handle.
What happened is in 2013 Microsoft Ireland refused an FBI warrant for information held on EU servers, under the control of MS Ireland.
Microsoft USA refused the warrant on the grounds on the jurisdiction grounds you mentioned above.
So the Cloud Act was passed: US law for access to digital information applies to any subsidiary anywhere on earth.
Sorry.
But assuming the owner is US company abiding US laws it's safe to assume that data would be transferred to US one way or the another.
Also consider that all communication between the European subsidiaries to the HQ is fair game under FISA.
Just look at US laws pertaining to data that goes through US companies.
I expect to see further selling out of these laws, as the economic prosperity declines. I can perfectly see german law limiting german companies from developing and selling AI products, while at the same time allowing us companies for a "pay our retires and pension-plans" kickback.
> you can't rely on OpenAI and Anthropic but you can rely on Nvidia, chips
Depends how hard you burn them. GPUs in this usage wear out fast from electromigration, but "we have no new ones and what we have lasts 9 months" is very different from "SaaS contract got Force Majure'd overnight".
All the EU sovreign cloud stuff right now is because governments fear Trump may invade, threaten to ban business immediately if we resist; SaaS cancellations cause harm instantly, before he TACOs out, whereas a hardware supply stop we may outlast him being told "no" by the stock market.
Thiss sounds like such a shitpost I initially thought you were joking... but this seems to be a real model???
- Mistral-Nemo: the actual model developed by Mistral and Nvidia.
- 2407: likely the release date of the base model, July of 2024.
- 12B: the model has 12 billion parameters.
- Thinking: the model operates in thinking mode (generates output plan and injests it before producing actual output).
- Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2: I think this means the model was finetuned with session data from Claude, Gemini, and GTP5.2 to replicate their behavior.
- Uncensored-HERITIC: the model was uncensored using the automated Heretic method.
- Q4_k_m: the model is quantized (lossy compression) to ~5 bpw from orignal 16 bpw.
Some of them are good. Others randomly break into gibberish and Chinese poetry(?).
So long as they're sufficiently liquid at the right time, they don't really need to shelter more. They need to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of their operating expenses.
What that reveals is the loaded cost of inference being more expensive than they've been showing, not cheaper. The crash would be the end of subsidized costs to users, not the revelation that it's a high-margin operation.
Selling compute/inference at more of a loss will probably not fly in the context of bankruptcy manoeuvers. They will need to shed spending engagements instead. I imagine Mistral would rather buy out some of their Nvidia purchase agreements for a discount if they want to build additional capacity at that time. I also don't think they'd be interested in US datacenters at all. If they want them they can get that in Canada, with a better ally and less political + financial risks, which is kind of the Mistral segment already.
They can't be operated for pennies on the dollar, though. The likely current status is that these products are subsidized to disregard model cost, and part of the operating cost.
If the bubble bursts, inference that can't be made profitable when factoring in operating costs will be scraped, not sold for pennies.
By providing specialized long-term services to corporate clients, they are securing exactly that.
Joke's on you, I'm European not American, so "your president" in this case would be the unelected Ursula and she would technically be a con-woman, not a con-man.
Not sure what your argument was supposed to prove with this cheap jab though.
If you argue she wasn't elected by the European population, well, Trump technically isn't too.