Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'

DivingForGold

Typical EU response. Seems Europeans have stumbled to 2nd or 3rd place in the A I race, if even that.

barbacoa

America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.

amazingamazing

Deepseek is open source. Whats stopping them from distilling it and releasing their own model today? Where is the reliance on America? Gpus?

SilverElfin

Unfortunately Europe is already far behind. OpenAI started over a decade ago. How can Europe catch up? Maybe if progress slows down and they have time to at least get into the same position as Chinese models, but they also need to invest in it. But with what money? And why would talented people stay there instead of going to America where they can get a fairer share of their hard earned money? There’s so much more to say, but it’s a big mess. And European voters and politicians are far too slow and unfocused to change their system drastically. By the time those incentives and problems are fixed it will be too late to be anything but a vassal state.

orochimaaru

>>>> In a world where you import all your digital services from the United States, you have no leverage over the United States It's a bit deeper than that. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as imagined, which it seems it will, it's not just a "digital service". It's a primary utility - like electricity, water or highways. Because without it your productivity will plummet. We aren't there yet - we will be there in a few years.

Oras

> and a challenger to OpenAI Big claim. Apart from Mistral OCR, I didn't find any of their models remotely useful. They do have a chance to become sole AI provider for France as French are trying to break from US tech, not because their product is useful. Sounds like a cry to raise more money, which is inline with their initial pitch [0] [0] https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral

JohnBrookz

Only mistral could re rerelease deepseeks model and do a worse job.

boomskats

If we could just do something, anything about being so aggressively colonised by the Palantirs and the neoliberal think tanks and the Christian far-right money, and ISDS-littered trade agreements, then the rest would just follow. Sadly though, I don't think we stand a chance.

Insanity

As a European I want mistral and EU to do well. But at the same time, I wouldn’t actually give up my well paid engineering job outside of EU to even entertain working for them in EU. Too low salaries and too high taxes.

mrtksn

The only thing that can “save Europe” is US embargo, otherwise doesn’t make sense to do replication of the US effort whatsoever. In US the AI is a private effort, in Europe there are no businesses that are interested in investing such large amounts of money when they can benefit from US made AI. In China they don’t have this option to use the US offerings so they must invest, be it the government or the business that will be protected from US competition. Unless Trump invades Greenland and EU makes sure that US tech is off limits for at least a decade to come, a revolution happens in UK or France goes full nationalistic there won’t be “European tech” beyond niche. Currently the “American AI” isn’t American, it’s bunch of Europeans, Canadians and Asians building the AI that will serve US and EU customers under the supervision of Americans using European, Arab, Russian and American money. It is incorporated in America but as Musk demonstrates, if you increase taxes or allow certain sexual relationships that CEO’s don’t approve they can just take it somewhere else.

InTheArena

Big tech bro CEO Stokes nationalistic fears to justify corporate handouts for his company. Europe is more like America every day.

DiabloD3

This is mostly a performance by the Mistral CEO. He is trying to justify the continued existence of the AI bubble in his country, claiming that, somehow, us Americans have figured it out and made LLMs work. We haven't, nobody has. LLMs don't work. They cannot think. They do not understand what you are asking them to do. They statistically reproduce text written by other people, and they cannot do so well. They are not good assistants, they are not good code authors, they are not good debuggers, they cannot help you find security exploits... they can only mimic what it'd look like if they did, as long as you don't squint too hard. All of the LLM startups are very quickly running out of runway, and will most likely never become profitable. OpenAI may collapse next year. Anthropic may collapse in 2028. Microsoft/Github seems to be pulling back on their Copilot bullshit and may just end up killing it entirely. Arthur Mensch is just trying to keep Mistral alive a little bit longer until the bubble pops, and is saying whatever whatever it takes to get a little more blood from that stone.

xyzsparetimexyz

Europe is never going to have sovereignty in a lot of areas. A vassal of the US or a vassal of China. Pick your poison.

cat_plus_plus

China's AI vassal state. But so far in a good way because it's open source and everyone benefits.

moomoo11

i always forget EU exists when it comes to tech they’re so hostile to it (lawfare) and have seemingly little innovation comparatively why is that?

vasco

Becoming? We all live under the American empire. Pretty much every international institution is dominated by American money, most high level positions in such institutions are cleared by Americans before they are appointed, they have military bases in almost every other western country and a law that allows them to invade the Netherlands if the international court ever tries someone they don't want to be tried. What illusion are we under? It's ok to think it's a benevolent dictator type situation but it is what it is. In fact the usual reply to this isn't a rebuttal but rather "what alternative is better?" to which I have no answer.

TrackerFF

I do believe that due to security concerns, European countries at the state level will try to detach themselves from relying on US infrastructure. Not only AI, but all critical things. For decades we've lived under the pretense that US is our main ally, and that realistically we'd never end up in a position where: A) They'd become enemies. B) They could just turn off access. One silver lining with Trump becoming president, is that he forced European leaders to revisit those assumptions. Sure, Trump will not be around forever, but we know what types of leaders the US public is able to vote to the top, and what they are capable of doing.

kingleopold

they already lost it but I guess it takes time to acknowledge it? Europe does not have capital or structures to catch up, it can't change in 2 years

trilogic

A quick search of revenue of google and facebook (in billions) 2015-2020. Is that so hard to understand that there is an entire economy wrapped around AI/IOT? Didn´t Europe learn anything from historic data? Google Facebook 2015 $67.80B* $17.93B Google segment revenue (Alphabet restructuring). Total Alphabet: $74.98B 2016 $81.30B $25.76B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $89.55B 2017 $100.10B $40.65B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $109.46B 2018 $128.90B $55.84B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $136.82B 2019 $143.90B $70.70B Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $161.86B 2020 $152.70B $85.97B *Google segment revenue. Total Alphabet: $182.53B Europe gdp for same years (in trillions): 2015 16.89 2016 16.88 2017 17.88 2018 18.89 2019 19.31 2020 17.42 Now by simple math a healthy gdp growth is around 4%, so just by creating and/or backing up 2 similar companies (in Europe) will revenue ~2.5% of the total entire European gdp. What is going on, are the European Leaders sabotaging our economy on purpose?

raincole

In other words, "EU governments please give me money." Not saying that American companies are better in this regard, but if we interpret each CEO's words with the same scrutiny as how we view Elon or Altman's words... that's pretty much it.