[mattnewton]

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.

[MichaelZuo]

Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support?

Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.

[mattnewton]

I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)

[cowpig]

I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.

[rolymath]

So, more than 70% of the compute on earth?

[wongarsu]

More than 5%, I assume. From the combination of "5% in the EU under European companies" and "each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU"

I dont't think that was meant to be implied: the EU actually has access to more GPUs than those hosted by European companies in Europe, just as US labs have access to GPUs hosted outside the US

[baq]

They can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays.

Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.

[Tepix]

The chinese labs manage to do it. Mistral should have enough money.

[wongarsu]

The EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanisms

It's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support

[snowpid]

China is a way more corrupt country but this might be a benefit of less rules.

[codebolt]

China has cheap coal powered electricity and leaders that make things happen. Europe has beaureaucrats that only love talking, high taxes and expensive energy.

[tormeh]

It's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.

[teiferer]

And a lot of the "funding" is through mutual deals with MSFT, Nvidia, etc. The Europeans have none of that and would need to pay in actual cash.