They’re not competing in the same domain - if you look at their business model it actually is much closer to ML consulting for companies (CMA CGM, ASML, Airbus…). The big three are trying to capture B2C mainly while Mistral is full focused B2B
I don't know about France, but here in Germany I think there's more room for B2B than B2C because of the desire for stability, itself leading to bureaucracy in everyday life that sets expectations for a much slower everything (like, buying a house took 7 months, many contracts have 3 month notice periods).
But that's just my best guess, and I'm saying this as one who migrated here rather than growing up here. I've also actually noticed the literal anarchists here, whereas the ones in the UK I only knew once they told me, before anyone makes a planet-of-hats kind of mistake on this.
Another aspect is that selling to all of Europe as a B2C business is hard. Until recently you ended up having to register for VAT all over the place, god only knows how many different specificities, bureaus, and rules, with most payment solutions not helping you in any way, and most accountants (in my experience) being at best unable to help you in any significant fashion, at worst being very confident in their ability to help you.
It is done, but by very few. And the EU has made progress on uniformizing and simplifying it, but it seems to have done more progress on the B2B side than on B2C.
While the US is a much bigger consumer market than any single EU country, with significant differences in disposable income and spending power. 18% to 20% of full-time workers in the US make over $100.000. That's nearly half the entire population of France. A third that of Germany.
And even if there are differences and administrative hurdles when selling across US states borders, that road has mostly (or seems to have, from here) been paved.
It brings more money. Europe in general has much more industry (hence China shock might be bigger) so Industrial AI makes more sense. And also the amount of Consumers needing industrial consulting is not high.
An hypothesis from my own consulting: firing an employee can be somewhat difficult, and their salary has quite some taxes on top. At my previous startup we’d rule-of-thumb calculate someone as costing us 140% of their pre-tax salary.
Put these two together and a freelancer becomes an interesting proposition for some tasks. In Germany I could bill roughly 2.5x my after-tax salary. You also incur no other costs such as equipment and illness-as—a-loss. And… you’re really easy to fire when COVID comes around.
I check almost every mistral model. But to be honest after agentic coding has become a thing, I only test their models in a chat app. I tried their coding TUI a few months back and found that it was way behind. It didn't even support skills back then. I wish they go strong just because they are a big AI player in Europe and I have personal connection to France.
mistral was never competitive and is getting less so, but that doesn't matter they cant be allowed to fail and have a long time to find their lane. They're smart and have an audience of like 600m people and the largest governments by spending who would use them if they were good enough.
I would speculate that the purpose is not just to have a domestically owned model that’s as good as the Chinese one, but for the investment to be used to build a domestic industry of people that know how to do it themselves, so as not to rely on foreign parties, so it doesn’t have to be better, just has to be good enough.
If you're a European AI lab and you see you can't compete with the Amerikans on compute or spending, and the Chinese are open sourcing their LLM work and keeping the Amerikans honest, then there's no real need for you to focus on LLMs
This is why Elon’s appealing. I thought they surely had the talent to be considered a fourth at this point. (Oh someone mentioned they’re politically unpopular at work.)
No they really don't because Grok is not a competitor. The big 3 are the big 3 because they have historically traded the top place for model intelligence. Grok has never crested that high. People like to think Grok isnt as popular because of elon and politics, but if Grok was the best coding model, nobody would give a fuck. Google has also not led since gemini 2.5 pro. It's really the big 2 at this point.
I'm statisfied by vibe coding-wise, but i found their TUI UX to be abysmal (not that CC is great, but definitely better). I'm talking to the extent of some characters from the numpad not being typable in the prompt. Have you had a similar experience?
I don't use the numpad characters, but I have tried Vibe, Goose (GUI and CLI), Dirac and the built in agent in Zed for vibe coding. I keep coming back to Mistral's Vibe. I actually find the ergonomics of it nicer than the others I've used so far. I really wanted to like Goose, and their GUI offering is OK for chat, but I thought their CLI was poor. Dirac was OK and I should try it again to be fair. Zed was just overkill and complex for what I needed. Vibe CLI seems to hit the sweet spot, although it's not perfect. The challenges I encounter are mostly down to API errors though and sometime bash tooling. I could configure it better for that, if I took the time (which I should).
The are in Europe and in France. The worst possible situation to be successful as a startup. I mean the extreme hiarchy, lack of salaries and taxation is not really gonna help.
And they obviously don't hire the right people. Reasons can be many-fold. One possible explanation is that there's not many talent left on the market, and most have been already picked up by other AI labs paying more $$$ while offering more exciting work and more exciting trajectory at the same time. Another possible explanation is that there is enough talent on the market left but their recruitment process doesn't allow them to recognize those people, hence it is broken. When I look into their job postings, I tend to give higher chances for the latter.
