Mistral has a different focus. They aren't taking on trillions in debt risking their entire economy to produce useful products.
I think they are leaders in the democratization of LLMs. Almost everyone has a computer right now that can run a useful variant of a Mistral model. I hope they keep their focus because what they are aiming for likely has the biggest impact on the average person and would be the best case scenario for the technology in general.
AFAIK: Current Mistral models are not competitive with SOTA-models that come out of the USA or China. They are "good enough" for enterprise usage when you don't need SOTA performance.
Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK all have housing and affordability problems, out of the five I can understand the UK but the other four countries I absolutely do not…
What do they all have in common English similar economies and relatively similar governments.
In Australia the root cause is likely policy that rewards rather than penalises multiple home ownership as investment, leading to flow on effects that raise prices and doesn't boost building.
However not all would agree with that and each stake holding group has a different take on things.
eg: The Australian home builders industry group, the HIA, throw shade on increased costs and government fees and push back on other hot takes here:
I lived through my peers struggling to get a single house built or rennovated in early 80's and later and watched finnancial incentives made it easier and easier to get a second, a third, a fourth house just as happens in Monopoly
Hand in hand with that, those people with houses as assets could afford to bid higher against each other for that fifth house .. pushing out those younger and just entering the scene.
It's hard to discount the rapid rise of a landlord class as being a significant factor.
As a refugee from the 1980s I remember all of the vertical computer companies that were out there all competing against each other but Wintel won, it is not too late for a new operating system or new hardware and in light of all this money being spent on AI currently it could still be done, but there seems to be no will to do so.
You don’t need Apple, Microsoft or Linux approval if you have the talent and the money you can create your own ecosystem. I would’ve loved to have bought a Next computer or a SGI computer back in the day, but I couldn’t afford it at that time.
Someone talented or a group of someone’s who don’t know any better will get the ball rolling again.
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