Mistral has a lot of potential, but there's the obvious risk that without proper monetization strategies it might not achieve sustainable profitability in the long term.
The French have a urge to be independent, the French government will hand them some juicy contract as soon as the can provide any product that justifies that.
I would say most European countries have that desire. That and the fact it can easily by fine tuned to the local language could make these models very popular outside the US.
Coupled with the concern that once you’re charging users money for a product, you are also liable for sketchy things they do with it. Not so much when you post a torrent link on twitter that happens to have model weights.
On their pitch deck it said they will monetise serving of their models.
While it may feel like a low moat if anyone can spin up a cloud instance with the same model, it's still a reasonable starting point. I think they will also be getting a lot of EU clients who can't/don't want to use US providers.
they seem pretty committed to open-source AI (from interviews I've heard with the founders) - but maybe if they manage to train models with truly amazing capabilities somewhere down the line, they will keep some closed source
The old open source, but we'll host it for you? I think Bezos is going to be in fits of evil laughter about that model in 5 years, as all the open source compute moves to the clouds, with dollars flowing his way.
But one thing Mistral could do is have a free foundational model, and have non-free (as in beer, as in speech) "pro" models. I think they will have to.
There are huge economy of scale benefits from providing hosted models.
I've been trying out all sorts of open models, and some of them are really impressive - but for my deployed web apps I'm currently sticking with OpenAI, because the performance and price I get from their API is generally much better than I can get for open models.
If Mistral offered a hosted version which didn't have any spin-up time and was price competitive with OpenAI I would be much more likely to build against their models.
At this valuation and given the strength of the team, it’s not hard to imagine a future acquisition yielding a significant ROI.
Besides, we don’t know what future opportunities will unfold for these technologies. Clearly there’s no shortage of smart investors happy to place bets on that uncertainty.
