China grants up to 200% tax deduction on intangible assets acquired through R&D. Means your spending on AI training fees becomes a tax return amount or like appears as a magical donation deductible on the books. I don't know if DeepSeek is benefiting from exactly such a system, but that's generally how aggressively China seeks its advantages in high tech R&D.

Nobody else is or has been that aggressive. France on a Monday morning would be like $10b for Mistral in 3 years, and that'll be it. China is like $10b every year for 5 top companies for 5 years. Not necessarily to say such an all-in-doubling-down-always moves would be necessary or correct, but there is that kind of substantial funding disparity between China and the rest of the world.

I understand Mistral compared to DeepSeek Flash is less intelligent, late, more expensive, and a third of the speed.

Equivalent might be stretching it.

My teenage son summarized Mistral in one sentence:

"Mistral is so bad, it's the only model my school doesn't bother to block"

never seen anyone using Mistral's models.

> Also, in practice the EU has its deepseek equivalent model in Mistral.

In practice, European companies don’t use Mistral.

First acknowledge the reality, then we can propose solutions.