Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't have a product and was founded four weeks ago. The few employees it has only started work in the last few days. All the same, Mistral AI hoovered up €105 million ($113 million) from lead investor Lightspeed Venture Partners with contributions from Eric Schmidt, …
As a French, I find the name is kind of a joke: «mistral» is a word from the south-east of the country, the name of a wind coming from the north-west. There's no mistral in Paris.
Also, they might know some HTML, but they apparently don't know about laws: a professional website must include mandatory information about the company behind it, the «mentions légales», as it were.
It would be rather sad if their first payment with those millions go to a 375000€ fine.
https://entreprendre.service-public.fr/vosdroits/F31228/personnalisation/resultat?lang=&quest0=1&quest=
Sirocco is, in fact, the exact opposite of Mistral, being a wind coming from the South-East.
AFAIK Mistral is particularly a cold NW wind, with sirocco being a warm, humid/sticky wind carrying warm air from N. Africa that has picked up a lot of moisture over the sea. On the other hand, variations of 'mistral' and 'sirocco' are in use in other parts of the Mediterranean and N. Africa, having originally being used to express the direction, and only later being adapted to refer to a specific type of wind.
Whenever anybody starts talking about gold rushes, I always remember that few prospectors made any money and only a tiny minority got rich, but the people who seriously cashed in were selling prospecting gear, food or sex.
I always remember that few prospectors made any money and only a tiny minority got rich, but the people who seriously cashed in were selling prospecting gear, food or sex.
Nvidia's share price has risen by ten times in the last few years :-)
Something similar in Britain and we would hear about the "world leading.." from Sunak and the rest.
Instead what the French are hearing today from Macron is:
« Nous sommes en bonne position en Europe continentale, mais nous sommes un peu décrochés par les Britanniques, tandis que les Etats-Unis d'Amérique et la Chine vont beaucoup plus vite que nous »
("In mainland Europe we're in a good position, but the British are a little ahead of us, while the US and China are moving much faster than we are.")
and « Le pire des scénario c'est une Europe qui investirait beaucoup moins que les Américains ou les Chinois et qui n'arriverait pas à créer de grands champions, mais qui déciderait de commencer par la régulation. » ("The worst scenario is that Europe invests less than the US and Chinese, and instead of creating champions decides to start with regulation")
Oh, he knows his political colleagues so well...
"computer programs don't eat, sleep or unionize."
Ah, but there will be rules for that! You might be able to drive them like machines now, but those who do better look at history, there will be an uprising!
One university I studied at had a phone based system to register for classes. It was only available 8am - 12pm and 2pm - 6pm (or some such). We found that pretty weird - it was after all an automated system, or so we were lead to believe. A friend suggested it was probably zombies answering the phones, and they would have (apparently) strict employment laws.
"computer programs don't eat, sleep or unionize."Electricity, maintenance, and ... well OK they don't unionise but on the other hand they do *exactly* what you tell them. ...... ChoHag
:-) .... Well, they used to do *exactly* what you tell them in the time before Large Language Learning Models escaped into the wild creating and threatening panic and mayhem, havoc and madness or, if you prefer, creating panic and mayhem in third parties threatening havoc and madness.
Why doesn't this surprise me? This entire industry is based on hype!
I wonder if Quantum Computing, Self Driving Cars and Nuclear Fusion will now languish and cease to find funding. AI could eventually lead to something useful, that's a given, but whether these chatbots will be it is debatable.
Umpteen shades of Theranos spring immediately to mind, and we all now know what/who that was designed to separate/identify/encourage seed money from.
But whenever and wherever hope springs eternal, this time it might be different if they know what really needs to be done ..... and more importantly, how it is to be done.
It's nice to know that human nature never changes as far as greed and stupidity are concerned.
It's now supposed to be considered apocryphal but I've always enjoyed the description of a firm founded at the time of the South Sea Bubble as being "a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" - which sums up most of the "AI" nonsense that a lot of companies are coming up with and this company in particular.
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