That's not to say I don't hope they will. It would be incredible if they could do that despite their limited funding and the wide swath of projects they are working on. I do think that lack of focus is going to be a big problem.
That's not to say I don't hope they will. It would be incredible if they could do that despite their limited funding and the wide swath of projects they are working on. I do think that lack of focus is going to be a big problem.
I think it's rather important for them that they at least keep attempting to build frontier models, because if they give up on that, then governments will no longer see them as a strateigic asset and instead just see them as a regular business.
I think that for better or worse, Mistral wants the buy-in from governments to scale up, and even if they have faltering outcomes, it's better to have that, and be able to say "look, this is what we tried, we failed due to lack of compute. We need more money for more compute."
I hope they will get that boost, but I'm afraid that they haven't built credibility so far to convince governments to buy in at the level needed. Their slip away from the frontier might even have made governments more cautious on investing in AI development, which is the opposite of what we need right now.