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.
> Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.
Of course not. When it comes to SOTA LLMs you have the choice between two bad options. For many, choosing the Chinese option is just choosing the lesser of two evils (and it's much cheaper).
People are probably assuming that the trends from the last few decades continue. The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia. The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US. They fumbled the transition to smartphones despite the Nokia advantage. They missed tablets; seemed like they just didn't have the industrial vigour to make a serious attempt.
The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution. They did manage to force Apple to switch from using lightening connectors to USB though so their wins can't just be laughed off. Maybe they'll surprise us but it'd be a welcome change from their usual routine.
We're lucky the EU regulators moved so slowly that the industry had already consolidated around USB-C (a standard that Apple was a key participant of and would have eventually moved to eventually). When they were first deciding what to do back in 2209, they decided that Micro-USB was the best standard. Imagine a world where everyone was forced to use Micro-USB...
The obvious takeaway here is that a country / blok can't regulate their way to innovation... so I'm not exact sure why you included it in your list of paradigm shifts. If anything, when the next paradigm shift around charging drops, the EU will be once again on the back-foot due to these short-sighted USB-C regulations they enacted.
I do share your sentiment that EU will miss the train once again on AI.
>Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes.
If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct. The richest block in the world should settle for no less than being state of the art. Anything less is fumbling it.
>NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.
The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats. ASML exists but is not enough for claiming EU superiority since the EUV light source is still US IP designed and manufactured. And one top company is too little.
>Worldwide massive success, mostly yes.
Worldwide success is where the big money is, and you need a lot of money for cutting edge research and experimentation to build the future successes. Hence the claim of EU fumbling software is correct.
>Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.
EU mom and pop shops aren't gonna make enough money to be able to afford risky ambitious ventures the likes of FAANGs have. Which is probably why you work for Hashicorp, a large global US company, and not some local EU company.
> Care to explain your accusations. I never attacked you directly, just the points you made.
You twisted "national successess" to "mon and pop shop". It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure", which is, frankly, absurd. Would you say Venmo is a failure because they're not used outside of the US (because other countries have better banking infrastructure)? Or that GM are a failure because they barely sell outside the US (because their cars are not adapted to other markets)? Or that United Healthcare Group are a failure because they only operate in the US?
Leboncoin are a massive peer to peer marketplace in France and a few neighbouring countries (IIRC Belgium), like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. They do a couple of hundred million in annual revenue. They are, undoutedly, a local success story. Are they a failure because they don't rival Ebay or Facebook Marketplace? No, because that would assume that the goal of each and every business is to become a global behemoth monopoly, which is an impossibility.
Similarly, Doctolib run healthcare appointment and everything related (online appointnments, digital prescriptions, secure storage and sharing of medical data like test results, AI voice note taking assistants for doctos, etc.) in France, and are expanding in a few neighbouring countries. In France they are the standard and pretty much what everyone uses. They are undoubtedly a success.
> It's a typically American argument "unless it's the global behemoth that has a global monopoly in the domain, it's a failure"
1. I'm not American, I'm European. And cool it with this finger pointing around nationality as I never brought it up. We can't have a civil discussion if you resort to identity politics as an argument.
2. I said no such thing. I never called those companies failures. You're the one saying that by twisting my arguments.
And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally the same like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc can. export products abroad, they just used existing FOSS technologies to build some local websites in the EU. Any other country on the planet can build their own versions of those apps, and they have, from India to Argentina. It's nothing special the EU made here. So how you can consider them in the ballpark of the tech companies before is beyond me.
And I didn't say you're American, just that you're using the traditionally American bad faith argument.
> I never called those companies failures
You just called them "mom and pop shops".
> And those online marketplaces and doctor apps you mentioned that are "local success stories" don't have invented any core tech that can be exported and monetized globally
And that's a different argument altogether. Not everything has to be core tech exportable all over, and one can be very successful without doing that.
If you're looking for core tech developed by European countries exported all around the world, enjoy Airbus, Siemens, Infineon, Alstom, Spotify, DeepMind (ok they were acquired by Google), VLC, ASML, SAP and plenty of others.
> Microsoft
> they just used existing FOSS technologies
Can you explain to me the difference between using FOSS and proprietary software to build a product, and what Microsoft are doing?
That's it? Just 3 companies? Out of which one is a state propped defense provider, and the other won from purchasing US tech. IDK how you can see that as a win for the world's richest block.
Europe is always 10 years ahead in all theoretical aspects.
Then they need money.
So most of the talent flee or get bought, typical example in machine learning space is huggingface or fchollet.
Then European government plays catch-up and offer subventions, but at the same time makes rules to make sure companies don't threaten US dominance, or Asian manufacturing.
Mistral is typically playing catch the subsidy game.
Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Europe is constructed so you can take 60 days vacation, work 32 hours a week, get tons of social benefits, can't really lose your job, and retire when you are 65 with a full pension.
Which is excellent. Unless you need to be economically competitive.
>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.
Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.
They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.
EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.
European Union construction happened after the second world war in the context of the Marshall Plan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan ) to help rebuild Europe that had been destroyed.
By design European laws are superior to national laws. Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
European population is getting old and replaced by a migration coming mainly from previous African colonies.
> Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.
That seems to violate basic physics and accounting laws. It isn't possible for everyone to be in debt all at once, because when everything nets out then there isn't anyone to make the loans. Someone has to be producing the goods that get consumed.
That's the magic of interest rates. Countries in the EU, let's say France for example have roughly 115% of GDP of debt. To service the interest of the debt it must finance each year the debt by paying the interests, and borrowing the sum on the market to reimburse the previous debts which are currently reaching their terms. The full owed amount is never paid back, but can be rolled forward indefinitely.
These interests are currently ~2% for France. Which mean the debt is manageable and the interests can be paid with the citizen's tax and the music can continue to play. But once France get out of the UE, interests rates become 5% then the citizens tax are not enough to pay the debt, and nobody wants to lend money to France anymore because even at 5% interests the risk of default becomes too great and they risk not getting the full amount-owed back so nobody lends, and since their is no money in reserve, and they can't borrow it means they default => bankruptcy. France doesn't have its own currency anymore so it cannot print its own money which compounds the problem. National resources get plundered, citizens get poor.
It is a game of musical chair which is highly non-linear.
Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.
I think the "still" implies that it's at least not increasing and probably slowly decreasing.
And except in some of the largest companies like Siemens (where it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore neither), the idea that manufacturing (or anything) may be profitable but not profitable enough has not taken hold as much as in the US.
You're wrong if you're trying to use the US as a negative example and think the EU is better. Yes, the US offshored more than the EU in relative terms, but it has more domestic manufacturing left more than the EU in absolute terms, making the US is the second manufacturer in the world right now, by quite a margin.
Meanwhile Germany's and the EU's short sighted energy policies have caused a lot of manufacturing to move outside the EU to places like the US or China.
The EU is in a very bad position right now manufacturing wise compared to how it was and how it could be. It basically never failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the last ~20 years.
But this makes zero sense. Two different continents, values systems, law systems. Not to mention the current USA administration is openly hostile to Europe. So why would anyone confuse the two.
Europe is at the mercy of the USA. Any difference in posture is due to local politics which can swing local elections, but European leaders are willing and eager to do what the US wants.
Sure, I'd agree with that a few years ago. Nowadays when the USA asks for something like just using their military bases for refueling, they're laughed at.
Yeah, I didn't think anyone would place any actual value on the stars. It almost doesn't need to be a feature, because what is it suppose to do exactly?
> How one is supposed to ensure license compliance while using LLMs which do not (and cannot) attribute sources having contributed to a specific response?
Additionally there seems to be a general problem with LLM output and copyright[1]. At least in Germany. LLM output cannot be copyrighted and the whole legal field seems under-explored.
> This immediately raises the question of who is the author of this work and who owns the rights to it. Various solutions are possible here. It could be the user of the AI alone, or it could be a joint work between the user and the AI programmer. This question will certainly keep copyright experts in the various legal systems busy for some time to come.
It seems that in the long run the kernel license might become unenforceable if LLM output is used?!
Either you allow LLM generated + human reviewed code or people start hiding AI use.
...and then people start going "that's AI" on every single piece of code, seeing AI generated code left and right - like normal people claim every other picture, video or piece of text is "AI".
IMO it's a lot better to let people just openly say "this code was generated with AI assistance", but still sign off on it. Because "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
> One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve!
Moonring[1] is another one that that is written in Löve (apparently by the co-creator of XBox's Fable series). The base game is even available for free. I had lots of fun playing it.
> In fact they precisely voted someone promising no more wars, no more foreign meddling, and so on.
In fact they voted for a convicted felon and rapist that lies to everyone as soon as he opens his mouth. A serial bankrupt that stole money from a charity.
That was all on the table and yet his voters said loud and clear: That guy, that criminal, that one full of hate and anger, who lies and does about everything if it is in his self interest, that's the guy that represents us best.
e:
"No more wars" didn't seem to be their main issue. Just imagine, Trump won the war after a week of bombing. The Iran regime is toppled and a US-friendly dictator is installed.
Are really sure his voters would not celebrate the war and great general Trump?
Sure, but do we agree that the unitedstatesian's (pet peeve: they shouldn't be called americans, per definition) Congress could at least stop one side of the war (the one that initiated the aggression). The Iranians would probably call that a victory, and probably not pursue further retaliation.
The US would then need to comply with whatever sanctions the UN might apply due to them having started an illegal war.
> The Iranians would probably call that a victory, and probably not pursue further retaliation.
I highly doubt it. Here are the facts from the viewpoint of Iran:
- The US and the UK overthrew the democratic iranian government of Mohammad Mosaddegh
- The US terminated the working nuclear deal.
- The US ambushed Iran twice in the midst of ongoing negotiations.
- Israel is on a conquest to annex new land and to rule over the middle east. At least that is likely there goal.
Iran clearly stated their demands. The US should pay up for the damage they caused and the US should give up its military bases in the Arab countries.
While the money will probably not be that big of a problem to negotiate, the military bases will be. At least Iran will insist on something substantive that guarantees that they are not ambushed a third time.
But from the non-Iranian point of view, those countries want those bases to protect them against Iran. So that's going to be problematic.
I mean, the US could unilaterally decide "no, we're not going to defend the Middle East anymore, good luck everybody" and leave. But it's not like the US is oppressing, say, Qatar by having a base there. They willingly let the US stay there.
> those countries want those bases to protect them against Iran.
As far as I know: Israel and Saudi Arabia want these bases. I do not know the current opinion of the other Arab countries.
> Qatar by having a base there. They willingly let the US stay there.
At least they are now noticing that there are risks in hosting the US military too.
> “One of the most significant outcomes of this war is the shattering of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf region,” Mr. al-Ansari said. “The regional security framework in the Gulf was based on certain axioms. Many of these axioms have been bypassed in the current war.”
> At least they are now noticing that there are risks in hosting the US military too.
Exactly. It's like having a douchebag "friend" over that then goes ahead to sleep with some neighbor's wife. Suddenly, your car is scratched, everyone in your neighborhood hates you, and he just up and leaves you to pick up the pieces.
Although in this case the US — the douchebag "friend" — it would be more apt to say that they actually murdered some of the neighbors' daughters and jointly attacked with some racist buddy another neighborhood and went on a rampage burning random houses down while gunning down the parents trying to take them to court.
It's still the same population that voted for Trump twice. It's the same constitution, the same supreme court, the same parties, the same oligarchie and the same god-king like office of the US president.
Nothing will change with respect to trust after the midterms.
> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
> Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.
I hope you are right. I'm tired of waiting for a product I paid for while the company is working on new products instead of finishing the one that is halfway there.
reply