[wald3n]

I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?

[ruicraveiro]

Hardware: Spot on.

There are European or open-source alternatives for just about everything. Beginning with the OS, there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, and so on.

Some hardware is produced in Europe. Goodram is a nice example. What we do not have is a processor architecture, nor factories. The closest to European is ARM. It is a British company, which is good, but outside the EU, and controlled by a Japanese holding, and fabless. Being fabless is the main issue here. (Edit: The Raspberry Pi is a strategic showcase of the status. It is a non-EU European product, uses a non-EU European ISA, ARM, but the chip implementing that ISA is made by a US company, Broadcom, and the Pi is the closest that we can get in terms of strategic autonomy).

I believe that our over-reliance on x64 is by far our biggest risk. ARM's existence should give us some comfort, but I don't think that it is enough, though. If I were to define a EU strategy for digital sovereignty, one of my cornerstones would be to bet on an ISA architecture and have a strategy to bring to Europe at least one CPU factory. I don't think that starting from scratch would be a viable option. However, betting on an existing open source architecture like RISC-V to make it far more mainstream could be viable. No matter how much we'd invest on RISC-V and how successful it would become, the point wouldn't be to make other blocs dependent on us, but to sever our current dependence on them.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

There seems to be some progress with https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w... at least.

Maybe Goodram can then assemble their chips into consumer products? :-)

[slopinthebag]

Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.

Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.

[dwedge]

Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.

I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved

[plagiarist]

I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.

I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.

I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.

[Tinkeringz]

They’re 5th off bottom on livebench

https://livebench.ai/

[atoav]

Yet their transcription model is the best out there currently subjectivity.

[notrealyme123]

Iirc: mistral has American investors, black forest labs hq has been moved to silicon valley.

[oytis]

That's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA

[rhubarbtree]

If the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.

[21asdffdsa12]

Hub and spoke market model of the world. Some realities can not change. could move back to britain-canada though.

[oytis]

Used to be much more distributed before WWII, or even before the dotcom boom. SV looks like an unstoppable vortex for everything high tech, to the point it becomes a security risk for everyone else

[schubidubiduba]

Basically every company has American investors. But for Mistral, ASML is the biggest, I think, and the french founders also still hold significant amounts.

And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.

[lejalv]

That's why the European way to tech sovereignty is (publicly-funded) free software. Cannot be bought by unlimited VC money from The Valley, and it benefits the rest of the world, which is a tiny drop, and hence a necessary one, in Europe offsetting the damages of colonization, past and present.

[oytis]

Free software alone doesn't give you tech sovereignty. What matters is who integrates and runs the software.

[lejalv]

Can you explain how you mean this? Obviously, it helps if the knowledge of the codebase is with a trusted partner. But taking as an example Grist (https://getgrist.org), which is developed by a NY-based US company and is part of the French La suite numérique (LSN). Should a geopolitical reason get in the way of Grist devs further collaborating with LSN, don't you think that France's sovereignty is safeguarded by the availability of the code?

Granted, it'd be a setback. But nothing a couple of dedicated French devs could not tackle.

What am I missing?