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A comment on See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old startup Mistral.

Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by ToJans on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @08:41AM (#36417709)
Reading through the memo, the GTM/use cases/market seem to be void of any kind of beachhead strategy?

I see lots of technical stuff, but the complete business plan & roadmap seems to be lacking any kind of tangible use case that is showing me how they plan to differentiate? (The technical reasons they state seem to be fairy minimal, and I don't see anything that competitors couldn't do either.)

The reason that I'm weary about this: I've spent a few years in an "innovation division" after customers repeatedly asked for such a service. Turns out the budget for long-running innovation-as-a-service is a hard sell, because in the end someone always has to pay for it, and innovation just for the sake of it gets old really quick. The long term survivors where the ones who continuously innovated for a particular use case - so more on a project basis...

So I'd assume that, just like with blockchain & VR/AR, the biggest value will be in very specific use cases in very specific verticals, as opposed to the "spray & pray" approach, offering an "AI as a commodity".

Or is this really just a EU FOMO play, i.e. US is doing it so Europe can't stay behind? (Probably hoping for EU funds/grants via that "Cedric O" guy.)

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by Clueed on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @09:19AM (#36418086)
I've read it like this: They differentiate themselves from OpenAI/Anthropic/other major players by being in the EU and (more) open-source; they differentiate themselves from other European competitors by being as good as OpenAI. I think it's a fine proposition given the early market and their team, as long as this hypothesis holds true for years to come,

> we believe that most of the value in the emerging generative AI market will be located in the hard-to-make technology, i.e. the generative models themselves,

and they truly can compete with market leaders.

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by ToJans on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @09:27AM (#36418160)
Ok, so they're aiming for a more "spray & pray" kind of GTM, challenging the incumbents based on the premise that it'll be EU based.

This basically then boils down to: "ChatGPT got x users in a week, and we want to do the same for EU.", without a clear path to profitability or guarantees.

So it's effectively a humongously risky bet by EU VCs?

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by rsynnott on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @10:00AM (#36418566)
> without a clear path to profitability or guarantees.

I mean, ^ describes literally all "AI" VC activity, surely? It is, currently, all speculation.

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by whiplash451 on Thursday June 22, 2023 @09:26AM (#36431829)
VCs keep lecturing candidates on making sure that they have paying customers on the radar from day one, so no, that does not look like a reasonable VC bet.
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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by ReDeiPirati on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @10:03AM (#36418596)
I think that the investors are mainly betting on the team expertise to train models as good as the one of OpenAI but with an open source approach (the main differentiator), which according to the founders would open up a bigger market opportunity for them.

> So it's effectively a humongously risky bet by EU VCs?

isn't it supposed to be VCs job to bet on risk proposition with the hope of a 100x return?

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by whiplash451 on Thursday June 22, 2023 @09:11AM (#36431621)
If you read the memo carefully, they do claim to be open-source at the beginning, but then switch to explaining that they will make money off closed-source models for their customers.

So, not more open-source than what OpenAI is doing.

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Re:See the pitch memo that raised €105M for four-week-old st... by whiplash451 on Thursday June 22, 2023 @09:13AM (#36431647)
It is definitely an EU FOMO play.

The catch, however, is that Germany and UK will also have their own Mistral.

Each will have direct and trivial access to their country's market, but much harder access to their neighbours' country.

From where I conclude that Mistral's TAM is mostly France, not EU.

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