how does this work in their favor as a business? Don't get me wrong I love how all of it's free, but that doesn't seem to be helpful towards a $2b valuation. At least WeWork charged for access
To Europe and France this is a most important strategic area of research, defense, and industry—-on par with aviation and electronics. The EU recognizes its relatively slow pace compared to what is happening in the US and China.
Exactly. EU's VC situation is dire compared to SV, which maybe isn't that bad if you think about what the VCs are actually after, but in this particular case it's a matter of national security of all EU countries. The capability must be there.
Mistral is funded in part by Lightspeed Venture Partners a US VP. But there are a lot of local French and European VPs involved.
The most famous one is Xavier Niel, who started Free/Iliad a French ISP/cloud provider and later cellphone provider that literally decimated the pricing structure of the incumbent some 20 years ago in France and still managed to make money. He’s a bit of a tech folk hero, kind of like Elon Musk was before Twitter. His company Iliad is also involved in providing access to NVIDIA compute clusters to local AI startups, playing the role Microsoft Azure plays for OpenAI.
France and the EU at large has missed the boat on tech, but they have a card to play here since they have for once both the expertise and the money rolled up. My main worry is that the EU legislation that’s in the works will be so dumb that only big US corporations will be able to work it out, and basically the legislation will scare investment away from the EU. But since the French government is involved and the guy who is writing the awful AI law is a French nominee, there’s a bit of hope.
They also have the EU protectionism card which is pretty safe to assume they will play for Mistral and the Germans (Aleph Alpha) - and thus also for Meta (for the most part). Iirc the current legislation basically makes large scale exceptions for open source models.
Many VC funded businesses do not have an initial business model involving direct monetization.
The first step is probably gaining mindshare with free, open source models, and then they can extend into model training services, consultation for ML model construction, and paid access to proprietary models, similar to OpenAI.
They are withholding a bigger model which at this point is "Mistral Medium" and that'll be available only behind their API end point. Makes sense for them to make money from it!
Because their larger models are super powerful. This makes sure their models start becoming the norm from the bottom up.
It also solidifies their name as the best, above all others. That's extremely important mindshare. You need mindshare at the foundation to build a billion dollar revenue startup.
They could charge for tuning/support, just like every other Open Source company.
Most business will want their models trained in their own, internal data, instead of risking uploading their Intellectual Property into SaaS solutions. These Open Source models could fill that gap.
