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Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. "The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" - so the idea is that ASML customers can somehow make use of Mistral AI?

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ASML is geopolitically relevant. If they want to offer dependable LLM-based solutions (even side products, like agents that help with their products) to their customers, they have to pick what partners to base their offering on.

Choosing something from US or China would add an external factor that could pull the rug at unexpected times. Mistral is safer for ASML because it has almost the same geopolitical constraints and stakeholders as they do.

This is surely meaningless. ASML's machines only work because of the US. This is not a geopolitical risk. This is a highly globalized process and all participants are significantly irreplaceable. If the US wants to harm ASML they just stop export of certain parts and materials. This would be utterly retarded because we're all on the same team here.

> utterly retarded

A certain golden man might disagree with you there.

maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.

"will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities" seems like the meat of that statement. I read that like they're (potentially) starting to investigate building chips for inference, with Mistral probably leading all the software parts, ASML handling the hardware.

It looks like a specialized proprietary application to identify defect patterns in lithography, similar to these papers:

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2024/04/03/ai-ml-rules-...

That seems to be one of the legitimate uses of "AI", as opposed to the generative nonsense. It also makes sense that the company is in the EU. Companies there tend to focus on real things as opposed to hot air. It also means that one cannot evaluate Mistral by focusing on its chatbot performance, since the real business seems elsewhere.

ASML not only sells the machines that makes chips (or analyses them like Yieldstar) but also makes software that customers use to work with the machine's - whether that is for designing, tweaking or analyzing chips.

How well does that stuff sell though? From what I remember when I worked there, services and the auxiliary hardware that comes with it, were a minority of revenue, although they wanted to more aggressively sell services to increase revenue.

AI helps designing tools for better machines?

Computational lithography.... apparently.

Lol I thought that Mistral would collaborate on a fab for AI accelerators, this is some Microsoft Copilot tier nonsense.

It looks like France pushed itself to Netherlands, as EU knows that ASML is one of the few strategically important companies left in EU. It had nothing to do with technology, just plain corruption

See: what happened to KLM

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