My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.
I hope you are right (I am in the process of finalising a product and one of the top-5 selling points contains "outside the jurisdiction of the US"), but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.
Sure, Mistral AI is certainly not the market leader and probably never will be but we're not talking about being a market leader but about having a moat.
I instantly believe you when you tell me that many companies do not care. On the other hand there are companies that do. At least partially: ASML, Stellantis, AXA, BNP Paribas, the French ministry of defense, Helsing, SNCF, ... are all Mistral AI customers.
Hang on, where are you getting the numbers from? I looked and I couldn't find any numbers on enterprises who opened their wallets for custom-trained models.
I looked, and because I believed that it might be a good business opportunity to explore, I did spend a bit of time trying to find numbers. I came away with the feeling that the winner in the AI space is going to be whoever successfully whitelabels their offering.
Right now that is Mistral, I think.
How do you measure "usage" in an enterprise/commercial context where no data on usage is available to you? I don't expect Mistral AI to make it's money on OpenRouter.
If you are in Iran, you don't want to give your data to your government.
If you are in France, you don't want to give your data to your government.
etc
If you are in France, and you host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong, well good luck for the authorities to get it.
If you host it in "secure France", on the paper you will have more privacy and laws behind you, but in reality you are jumping into the mouth of the shark.
This is why governments are promoting: "yes yes, host here don't worry, we will protect you"
"We want your data on X, here;'s a warrant."
"No."
"You are now under arrest for contempt of court."
People have some oddly silly views on what government can and can't do to people living in their territories.
And companies really really don't care if the government has their data.
> host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong
Now China has it, gives it a competitor in China and your market share drops like a stone. Congrats! Great choice!
The trick is to host your data in a country with a strong rule of law, and avoid illegal / geopolitical lines. If you're an American company hosting stuff in Russia, you can bet the GRU/SVR would be very happy to abuse it. If you're running a torrent site in Ukraine, you can bet the US would be very happy to claim extraterritorial magic jurisdiction and get you extradited from Poland.
As a French company, you're already beholden to French law and French legal decisions. "Data is hosted in Hong Kong" doesn't matter in the slightest, it only exposes you to more risk.
Companies will use US ai models without issues a few years.
I have not seen that, actually. I still see most companies who want to jump into AI for the business sort of try RAG, but more often they just buy Chat accounts for their users.
The only place that harnesses appear to be used is in software development, but most companies aren't doing that either.
The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.
If they can pull ahead in having the most number of pre-trained models (one for this ERP, one for that CRM, etc) and then being able to close sales to companies using these products and sell them on post-trained (give us your specific ERP customisations and we'll give you access to a model that is tailored to your business), then THAT is a moat.
But they need to do this without fanfare. Just close sales, and keep closing, basically. After all, even if other AI providers copy the process, the moat would already have been established for Mistral.