Comment by mythz 21 hours ago
Europe's bright star has been quiet for a while, great to see them back and good to see them come back to Open Source light with Apache 2.0 licenses - they're too far from the SOTA pack that exclusive/proprietary models would work in their favor.
Mistral had the best small models on consumer GPUs for a while, hopefully Ministral 14B lives up to their benchmarks.
Mistral biggest investor is asml, although it became so later than other vcs
I mean, one is a government, the other are VCs (also, I would be shocked if there isn't some French gov funding somewhere in the massive mistral pile).
> I would be shocked if there isn't some French gov funding somewhere in the massive mistral pile
There is a bit of it, yes, although how much exactly is difficult to know. It’s not all tax breaks and subventions; several public agencies are using it, including in the army so finding out the details is not trivial.
1. It matters.
2. Did ASML invest in Mistral in their first round of venture funding or was it US VCs all along that took that early risk and backed them from the very start?
Risk aversion is in the DNA and in almost every plot of land in Europe such that US VCs saw something in Mistral before even the european giants like ASML did.
ASML would have passed on Mistral from the start and Mistral would have instead begged to the EU for a grant.
All thanks to the US VCs that acutally have money to fund Mistral's entire business.
Had they gone to the EU, Mistral would have gotten a miniscule grant from the EU to train their AI models.