alt Hacker NewsRespectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead.
Who else will buy their AI?
and what other options do they have?
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You don’t think it’s smart to get reliable funding this way? From Banking the Cash Cow?
Devstral is getting better, it’s the Vibe harness that’s holding it back (I think). I can see how that would drive some business as well.
Their chat thingie isn’t very well positioned, but gets results. Could be an euro or two per month, maybe bundled with some more features. It’s not like Mistral has no options, if anything they’re just a bit complacent and not ambitious with their plans.
There are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.