France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to take on OpenAI

Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by dopamean on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:18AM (#36327292)

> It’s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing — it’s only around a month old — but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as well.

Unless I missed it elsewhere in the article this part really glosses over something I have a hard time understanding. 113M seed round at a 240M valuation for a company that has no product yet and a plan to build something like something else that already exists. This feels insane to me.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by mach1ne on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:25AM (#36327396)

Maybe there’s enough money in Europe that investors who were anxious to join the AI train jumped the gun. Indeed the whole thing is sketchy.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by papruapap on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:41AM (#36327639)

Speech 100, at least the ceo have job security. Jokes aside, I wonder why people think that public available means copyleft.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by Nasrudith on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:46AM (#36327720)

To be frank my first instinct is "slush fund" from the start just because they are appealing to nationalism first. Starting off with a thought terminator is a mark of a deceiver.

Edit: I mean would you expect anything less than a slushfund or grift from an "America AI" project?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by elcomet on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @11:52AM (#36327811)

They're investing in the team, which I think is smarter than investing in an idea. Those people built llama at meta and flamingo/chinchilla at deepmind.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by version_five on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:13PM (#36328123)

Google, Facebook and others spent billions buying the best ML people and giving them the best, and got scooped badly by OpenAI. And I know it's a cliche but lots of better engineered "iphone/ipod" products existed that got destroyed by apple. Unless they can invest in the man himself - a Jobs or Altman, I don't think investing in a good team is an automatic road to victory.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by acchow on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:36PM (#36328498)

I don't think I'm acquainted with "better engineered iphone products existed". Care you share about it?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by AuryGlenz on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:19PM (#36330208)

Yeah. iPod I might agree with, though the interface on the device itself was pretty top tier. iPhone? Nah.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by simonebrunozzi on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @02:51AM (#36400575)

Nokia, a couple of years before the iphone's launch in 2007.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by littlestymaar on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:31PM (#36329401)

I don't think you can even remotely compare Jobs and Altman here, especially given how badly he missmanaged the enormous advance OpenAI had with Dall-E. In fact, he was lucky to have midjourney and stable diffusion kicking his ass on image generation and pushing him to actually release a product, otherwise Anthropic and Llama could have done the same on the LLM side.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by WanderPanda on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:20PM (#36330215)

You forget that OpenAI wasn‘t supposed to have products in the first place

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by plonk on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:16PM (#36330153)

> better engineered "iphone/ipod" products existed that got destroyed by apple

Do you mean Nokia's phones?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by madrox on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:20PM (#36330214)

Nothing can destroy Nokia phones

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by evbogue on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:52PM (#36330774)

It's true. I had a Nokia phone in 2003 that survived being thrown in the washer and the dryer before I noticed it was missing.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by frumper on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:58PM (#36330846)

No one wants a dirty phone.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by user432678 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:08PM (#36332682)

Except that ex-Microsoft manager…

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by dopamean on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:08PM (#36328054)

I get that. Call me old fashioned but if I were investing a hundred million dollars I'd like the team to build _something_ for me first. Maybe that's why I dont have a hundred million to invest lol.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by ivalm on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:12PM (#36328112)

It costs like $50M to build a next gen model, so if what they want to pitch is training next gen models it makes sense they get $100M to try. Similar to Hippocratic AI $50M seed raise. If anything this founder team seems more legit.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by iancmceachern on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:17PM (#36328196)

Interesting, what is the bulk of the cost? Programmer labor? Data center time?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by dougSF70 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:27PM (#36328349)

GPU...H100 arent cheap and you need lots of them. And some where to keep them cool.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by atlasunshrugged on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:58PM (#36328875)

RE: Hippocratic AI, interesting Forbes piece about the founder out a day or two ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/lawsui...

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by ivalm on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:23PM (#36330286)

I talked to Munjal and team when they were ideating on Hippocratic, even he acknowledges that healthiq was a shit show. AFAIK it was 30 people running a 1k person call center and failing. This motivated Hippocratic as they think they can do AI-based call center replacement because they were so burned out of running human-staffed call centers.

I think Hippocratic is interesting because their leadership is business focused and not very technical, while a lot of other new foundational model cos are led by technical people. I’m curious how this shakes out.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by BLanen on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:00AM (#36338334)

> Forbes piece

It's a web blog. Not a "Forbes piece"

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by aerio on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:25PM (#36349128)

A piece on Forbes written by Forbes staff

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by eyphka on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @04:05PM (#36331801)

If something is already built, why do they need your hundred million?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by killingtime74 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @08:38PM (#36334910)

That's what a seed round is. If you like you can always invest later when they do have the product. The valuation may not be the same though

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by boringg on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:32PM (#36328432)

That's a real lofty move. Many incredibly intelligent and talented people are incapable of producing products that work.

An example of a company that did that is all the Google X products - smart people not many great outcomes and a ton of capital.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by ska on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:38PM (#36328537)

Why are you proposing they chose the team because they were "smart" rather than because they "ship things", as per GP comment?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by aerio on Thursday June 15, 2023 @08:22PM (#36349105)

I don't think they bothered to read the article.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by pera on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:30PM (#36328379)

It's funny, the comments here reminded me to this other submission (from 2014):

Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127938

> $400M for a company I've never heard before is quite surprising

> If the article is correct, they bought the team.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by Barrin92 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:24PM (#36329290)

Especially on HN it's pretty common for people to retroactively justify these kinds of decisions based on results, but it always reminds me of an article I read a few years ago (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/western-elite-chi...)

"When I was an intern, in one of the training presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish between the process and the results. He said that we should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he said, we don’t punish people for losing money for the right reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the wrong reason?"

Just like that old Dropbox comment that people love to bring up, you can make a gazillion dollars off a bad bet, and you can lose following a good strategy, that's the case everywhere probabilities are involved. Outcomes don't determine if the original evaluation was sound or not.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by pera on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:42PM (#36329566)

I agree and just to clarify: I don't think/know whether this startup will be successful or not, in fact I don't even know if buying DeepMind was a good investment for Google (financially speaking). I only mentioned it because the comments were very similar.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by talldatethrow on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:27PM (#36331265)

I've been around for a while and don't know of a famous dropbox comment? Curious to hear it if someone can answer. Thanks

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by wasimanitoba on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:34PM (#36331360)

it's this comment where the user suggests that dropbox will never be successful because it's "trivial":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753850

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by adamsmith143 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:24PM (#36329291)

You should throw all your money in then. Meanwhile teams with good people who also have a good product are going to eat them for lunch.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by anyoneamous on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:33PM (#36329420)

You are ignoring how protectionist France is - a native company will basically get first refusal for any government work.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by kpw94 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:25PM (#36331226)

"the team" here seems to be a trio of research scientists/data scientists? (Some famous in their research community bubble)

Competent product/sales person, and engineering person seems missing for this to succeed. Especially if they used to rely on the eng infrastructure of giants.

They seem smart folks so probably can cover the software engineering gap, especially with $100m to outsource some of the hard problems to some cloud infra.

But I'd be more confident if they had started with a co-founder that's more product/sales oriented.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by hospitalJail on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:07PM (#36328023)

What makes this different from what stabilityAI is doing?

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by rjzzleep on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:16PM (#36328165)

Looks like the crypto grifting moved on the generative AI.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by shrimpx on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:01PM (#36330896)

It won't be on the same level until there's a consumer investor frenzy, for which there's no vehicle yet.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by cuteboy19 on Thursday June 15, 2023 @04:27AM (#36337783)

Difficult to monetize it and MLM ize it in the same way

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by konschubert on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:07PM (#36330968)

EU politics.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by TechBro8615 on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:12PM (#36331026)

This is total speculation, but maybe there is some kind of deal with the French government on the table.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by geodel on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:01PM (#36332583)

Somewhere in their offices they be putting quote from Neils Bohr to pat on their back :)

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

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Re:France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round to t... by constantcrying on Thursday June 15, 2023 @12:43PM (#36343189)

>This feels insane to me.

Maybe. But there seems to be a reasonable investment case. Especially if the EU is making stupid laws, being the "European AI" company seems quite valuable.

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