Mistral is pursuing pursuing B2B use cases. Thats because they're releasing open models and the big thing about B2B is they HATE sending their data off-prem. OCR'ing and organizing old docs is a huge feature in B2B. Mistral's strategy seems smart to me.

Form processing is vastly more useful than meme generation. When people need to do real work this is the sort of tool they are going to reach for.

Following the leaders too closely seems like a bad move, at least until a profitable business model for an AI model training company is discovered. Mistral’s models are pretty good, right? I mean they don’t have all the scaffolding around them that something like chatGPT does, but building all that scaffolding could be wasted effort until a profitable business model is shown.

Until then, they seem to be able to keep enough talent in the EU to train reasonably good models. The kernel is there, which seems like the attainable goal.

> It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are

The EU is extremely invested in Mistral's development: half of the effort is finding ways to tax them (hello Zucman tax), the other half is wondering how to regulate them (hello AI act)

We're too busy with real life to bother with generating SVGs of pelicans on bicycles sorry, but feel free to dump billions on chatbots

I guess it's better to do the same stuff everyone else is doing?

I think there is a lot of broad support, but they're just kind of hamstrung by EU regulation on AI development at this stage. I think the end game will ultimately be getting acquired by an American company, and then relocating.

>It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested

Maybe, i think it will be to our benefit when the bubble pops that we are not heavily invested, no harm investing a little.