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Le Chat: Custom MCP Connectors, Memories

(mistral.ai)
397 points Anon84 | 3 comments | 04 Sep 25 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pembrook ◴[04 Sep 25 13:40 UTC] No.45127183[source]▶
It feels like the only path Mistral has to win is by targeting risk-averse European enterprises by waving the EU banner and having them force it on their employees. Even then, if they fall far enough behind they won't be able to do that either. Seems like a sad outcome for European tech given all the talent Europe has. It's frustrating.

You watch the OpenAI launch videos and its a surprising variety of Europeans accents talking about all the value they're creating in the US, instead of back home, simply due to the more favorable business/investment policies of the US.

My pet theory is, outside of the silly regulatory stance, the real reason Europe can never compete in each wave of tech (mainframe > pc > internet > mobile > social > AI > etc.) is government pension systems hoovering up all private capital and investing it into european governments (bonds) instead of european businesses (equities).

Centralizing the financial assets of an entire country, subjecting it to the whims of politics thus requiring it be invested it into extremely low risk bonds instead of a larger portion in European equity indexes or even a tiny portion in venture capital has created this situation: https://i.redd.it/fxks3skmvt4e1.png

Yes, a vast majority of VC funds lose money. Hence why it's bucketed in 'alternatives' and never a major part of pension portfolios. But the small group of winners literally create the future tax base to fund the social welfare system to continue existing (not to mention the future military tech which it turns out is useful when your neighbors get hostile). Not taking the risk means you never get the reward.

If Europe put even 1-2% of their $5T in pension assets into venture...even grossly mismanaged Softbank style...I find it hard to imagine you wouldn't accidentally create a few $100+ Billion companies in 10-20 years. More important would be creating the startup ecosystem for taking the rest of the worlds capital into these ventures as a multiplier.

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1. cheeseface ◴[04 Sep 25 13:57 UTC] No.45127347[source]▶
Government pension funds are a part of it, but it’s a combination of many things, like:

- The US has been a single market for a much longer time than the EU, and the EU still is not a single market, primarily due to language barriers (Germany, France, and Italy are large enough markets to have their own localized, but slightly worse SaaS options)

- European societies are more arranged around the common good and have lower income differences between people and super-wealthy individuals by design. The US is built around being the place where talented people can make the most money out of their skills, which results in many people worldwide choosing it as the place to go to, as the talent market is a global one.

- European values tend to value making as much money as possible or competing and being the winner less, which results in people grinding less and being happy when they become rich enough to focus on other things.

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2. pembrook ◴[04 Sep 25 14:56 UTC] No.45128011[source]▶
Yes on the single market being a huge issue, but the other "cultural" differences are total BS, and just modern media narratives.

Western Europe and the US had essentially the same level of government safety nets (and government spending and economic growth) from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Who do you think started all of the European industrial giants that are still globally competitive today? Europe had no problem competing in the industrial revolution, if these were actually European values there would be no competitive European industry like there is no competitive European tech. It's only the digital revolution that Europe has struggled with.

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3. fy20 ◴[05 Sep 25 03:30 UTC] No.45134750[source]▶
I feel the main issue was that the US historically was the place to go if you want to study or work with the "best" tech minds so talent flocked there. During the industrial revolution you couldn't so easily just pack up and move across the world.

Even now where I don't think that holds true so much (there are small pools of talent elsewhere, e.g. Stockholm is hot right now), a good senior engineer in Europe may be able to get €100k, and you are looking at 2 or 3 times in the US, so it's still attractive to relocate.

Cultural differences (mainly language barriers) made it hard for somewhere like that to evolve in Europe. Yes everyone in tech speaks English, but if you move to say Poland and want to rent an apartment or see a doctor, you would have had a hard time without at least a basic understanding of Polish. It's completely different from someone moving from Texas to SFO.

Ironically all the immigration of Russian speakers over the last few years has actually helped embrace English in these countries, as for nationalistic reasons they don't want to embrace Russian.

In the 2000s and early 2010s London was the tech hub of Europe (English speaking, many high ranking universities in the vicinity), but Brexit f***d that up.