Their target market is completely different. Anthropic and OpenAI try to build general AI that wins on all the benchmarks by throwing ungodly amounts of money at it.
Mistral focuses on long term b2b contracts and their proposition is that they fine tune their model to your needs with an added bonus of 'not dependent on America' in a politically tumultuous time.
Another added bonus is that they offer a clear "self hosted" if you want it, you can get the exact same product without sending your queries to them, it's costlier and you need the hardware sure, but between the economic espionnage aspect, the sovereignty aspect, the data safety aspect ... This has teeth in europe.
An so like if a business wanted to home in on one very specific use case that could be hyper optimized by SFT, had really good support for updating and adding new features, on-Prem etc. that’s the kind of market they are in?
Innovation is a pretty neutral concept. It doesn’t care about things like “what if my model learns from other models” as opposed to “what if my model learns from data I painfully curated” if the model progresses the same.
"there's no shortage of talent in Europe or France, it's just an issue of available capital"
This is more complicated than you paint it. Countries like UAE have enough capital to throw at things and little-to-no taxation, yet they don't attract as much talent as they would like to.
Preexisting centers of excellence like Silicon Valley are attractive for young talented people precisely because a lot of older talented people are already there. The same reason why a young talented painter in 15th century would prefer Florence to some rich, but boring place elsewhere.
You can only really do a meaningful work in a "heavy" field by tightly cooperating with others, and physical proximity still matters.
A large contingent of the top AI people is French, the Mistral founders worked at Meta and Google before coming back to France. The real issue is capital, French salaries are shit
Mistral focuses on long term b2b contracts and their proposition is that they fine tune their model to your needs with an added bonus of 'not dependent on America' in a politically tumultuous time.