from Hacker News

Mistral AI raises $640M at $6B valuation

by trybackprop on 6/11/24, 8:48 PM with 60 comments

  • by t-writescode on 6/11/24, 9:00 PM

    All this external money raising when it comes to AI scares me.

    For companies that are built off these AI services, there's a very real fear that the prices we're getting on API calls aren't covering the costs of the requests themselves under some assumption that costs will magically go down, or we'll get locked in.

    I hope the companies like Mistral and OpenAI know that if they're selling API access below cost they could be the origin of a __lot__ of companies closing and choose to make sure their operating costs are sustainable. (I understand creating new features and new models taxes additional capitol and that's a perfectly fine use of VC money. But selling a $1.00 for $0.90 is dangerous and bad.)

  • by dvt on 6/11/24, 9:02 PM

    Mistral is one of the few AI companies I am extremely excited to see get better funded.

    I'm working on a local product (coming soon™) that uses Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 under the hood. Parsing screen reader text (and taking actions, etc.) via local LLMs is, in my humble opinion, the future of computing. Even though getting it right is hard, and there's lots of edge cases, it's pretty awesome when it works. Mistral has been (by far) the most reliable model to date. I'm likely going to be fine tuning it over the next few months, but here it is working on Windows and MacOS in both web browser[1] and file manager[2] contexts.

    [1] https://vimeo.com/931907811

    [2] https://dvt.name/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-11.png

  • by underyx on 6/11/24, 8:56 PM

    Any source for the valuation number? Article does not mention.
  • by champagnepapi on 6/11/24, 9:02 PM

    Looks like Mistral AI just caught a $640 million mistral!
  • by CesareBorgia on 6/11/24, 9:35 PM

    With La Plateforme and Le Chat — whose names exude the elegance emblematic of the company’s French roots

    Bizzare

  • by dash2 on 6/11/24, 9:31 PM

    That seems weirdly low given AI hype. Why is OpenAI worth more than ten times more?