China grants up to 200% tax deduction on intangible assets acquired through R&D. Means your spending on AI training fees becomes a tax return amount or like appears as a magical donation deductible on the books. I don't know if DeepSeek is benefiting from exactly such a system, but that's generally how aggressively China seeks its advantages in high tech R&D.

Nobody else is or has been that aggressive. France on a Monday morning would be like $10b for Mistral in 3 years, and that'll be it. China is like $10b every year for 5 top companies for 5 years. Not necessarily to say such an all-in-doubling-down-always moves would be necessary or correct, but there is that kind of substantial funding disparity between China and the rest of the world.

My teenage son summarized Mistral in one sentence:

"Mistral is so bad, it's the only model my school doesn't bother to block"

I understand Mistral compared to DeepSeek Flash is less intelligent, late, more expensive, and a third of the speed.

Equivalent might be stretching it.

never seen anyone using Mistral's models.

> Also, in practice the EU has its deepseek equivalent model in Mistral.

In practice, European companies don’t use Mistral.

First acknowledge the reality, then we can propose solutions.