Mistral really became what all the other over-hyped EU AI start-ups / collectives (Stability, Eleuther, Aleph Alpha, Nyonic, possibly Black Forest Labs, government-funded collaborations, ...) failed to achieve, although many of them existed way before Mistral. Congrats to them, great work.
It feels to me they turned into a generic AI consulting & solutions company. That does not mean it's a bad business, especially since they might benefit from the "built in EU" spin (whether through government contracts, regulation, or otherwise).
One can deploy similar solution (on-prem) using better and more cost efficient open-source models and infrastructure already.
What Mistral offers here is managing that deployment for you, but there's nothing stopping other companies doing the same with fully open stack. And those will have the benefit of not wasting money on R&D.
That's what we do with Hopsworks - EU built platform for developing and operating AI systems. We have customers running DeepSeek-v3 and Llama models. I never thought about slapping a Chat UI on it and selling the Chat app as a ready made product for the sovereign AI market. But why not.
i'm an outsider but none of the startups mentioned above ever came to my ears. Mistral suddenly popped after openai/anthropic exploded, and they were rapidly described as the 3rd contender, with emphasis on technical merit. Maybe i was fooled though.
Black Forest Labs are the makers of FLUX, which for a while was the best open image model available (and generally a pretty strong image model). That said, now with a wave of Chinese models and the advent of autoregressive image models, I'm not sure how much that will stay true.
