Since the topic of 'Europe' has become a culture war issue (like everything), I can see that most comments here are showing a bias. You're defending OP who openly says he 'will always cheer for Mistral' regardless of objective reality. Is that not bias?
Among Americans, it appears that, if you're a college-educated white collar worker (champagne socialist), hippie degrowther, big tech alarmist, or just a left-leaning urbanism enthusiast (the current reddit/hn audience) you want the entire world to become the fantasy version of Europe you have in your head...so anything Europe does is the best thing thats ever happened, regardless of objective reality.
Or if you're the opposite, you think the EU is essentially playing out the collapse of USSR-lite in slow motion. I'd say I'm closer to this camp just looking at the financial situation, as someone actually living in the EU.
Is either position entirely rational? No.
I personally want Mistral to succeed. But this cannot happen unless we accurately assess the situation and objectively discuss the quality of their offerings compared to the alternatives, as well as the way that Europe is doing everything in its power to kill any intra-country cooperation or private sector innovation.
Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.
If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.
Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.
I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.
> Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.
What are you talking about? Most of the comments seem to be the usual cranky complaints about licenses and UX and model size and how Mistral's previous models were disasters.
And a huge tell for what? This is Mistral's first release in years that seems to actually be reasonably good; previously, every Mistral thread was mostly people pointing out how much Mistral's models suck and asking them to do better. Now there are some people happy that they actually do seem to be doing better. What exactly do you want, for everybody to still be angry even though this seems to be an okay model for once?
I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.
It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Yea the pandemic is overfit as a reason for most things. Production had already left over the preceding decades.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, the incestuous hollywood-to-traditional media marketing pipeline died (much of old print/tv media existed to market Hollywood stars and products), etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
> Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you probably didn't see Dhurandhar or Ne Zha 2 last year (the highest grossing films in India and China respectively)?
Funny you mention superhero films, because that's also what killed the American comic book industry.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
>comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate
How is a very large operation more efficient at producing comic-book sales than a smaller operation?
Why cannot new comic-book companies easily be created? One guess I have is that most of the profit potential is in sales of new stories about characters that are well-known, like Superman or the Incredible Hulk, and copyright law prevents new entrants from selling those stories.
This is a bunch of regurgitated horseshit that business school grads repeat to each other like a game of telephone based off some PR puff pieces written about McKinsey in Fortune magazine back in the 1980s.
Pure strategy advice represents less than 20% of McKinsey billings (as publicly revealed last year).
Both firms are full of low level talentless grunts, essentially just fresh grads from different tier schools.
The only measurable difference between the two is that Accenture makes heavy use of geographic talent arbitrage by hiring heavily in India so they can do higher volume/lower-rate implementation gigs. The companies that spend the most with consulting firms are usually legacy dying companies and governments, not exactly a picture of competence (you think OpenAI or Anthropic are asking strategy advice from McKinsey?)
All professional services firms are commodity human time resellers, there is no special sauce or reality behind the 'brand narrative' behind any particular firm.
They don't need to be on internet. They just need to be available remotely. Simple VPN would've solved the issue entirely (...well, up to the moment when they won't update that, but updating VPN is far cheaper than commercial refrigerator controller I'd imagine)
Do you have an instance where a European government has said "If you use any Google/Microsoft/Meta products or are involved with them in any way you will be unable to do any business with our government"? Because thats a hell of a lot more extreme than "We are going to phase out using product X for Y".
Video games are definitely an essential need for the modern leftist internet incel, so to allow capitalists to risk time and money producing games you can choose to voluntarily play, and then allow them to charge rents in exchange for you voluntarily playing their games....well that's the definition of criminality!
The government should seize the video game means of production and all video games should be government produced. Quality will definitely go up, not down, the more the government starts meddling in this highly essential market. There's zero downsides to weaponizing the guys with guns to write laws that disincentivize the creation of the thing you want created, rent control works amazing every time.
If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.
Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.
> If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
No, only metaphorical AI spinning blades and flamethrowers should be regulated. Actual AIs with spinning blades and flamethrowers will be subsidized and unleashed in your town.
I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.
This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."
Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.
Fine then let's reframe it: why can't the companies release games on their terms at their prices and allow consumers to decide whether they want to transact?
Why do you believe game companies have special rights that book and music publishers don’t? If I buy a book or CD, I can keep that copy forever, sell it, lend it, donate it, give it away, or let my kids inherit it. I own that copy.
Why can’t I do all those things with a copy of a game I bought?
You are comparing products that aren’t equivalent. If I “buy” a book on Kindle, that book might have restrictions (natural or artificial) that don’t apply to a physical book.
The product is what it is. If you don’t like it don’t buy it. If you bought a physical Xbox disc 20 years ago, you wouldn’t expect to be able to use it on PlayStation.
There's an important legal difference between books and CDs, which I'll get into at the end of this. For now let us just look talk about books.
> I can keep that copy forever, sell it, lend it, donate it, give it away, or let my kids inherit it
The works because the way most of us acquire copies of books doesn't involve entering into any kind of contractual arrangement with the copyright holder, so as long as what we want to do does not violate the copyright owner's copyright rights we can do anything with that book that we'd be legally allowed to do with a similar physical object (say a blank notebook).
Copyright law does give the copyright owner the exclusive right to distribute copies but there is an exception, the first sale doctrine, that says the owner of a particular lawfully made copy does not need permission from the copyright owner to "sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy".
If we bought our books through some channel where they could require us to agree to a contract in order to be allowed to buy they could include restrictions on what you can do with the copy, just like game companies do.
It would be hard to enforce since they would have to do it by suing people who violate the contract which would be impractical almost all the time.
Compare to digital goods, especially executable digital goods, where they can make it so using your copy requires checking in with a server of theirs which can refuse to let you use the thing if it thinks whoever bought it has broken the contract.
The important legal difference between books and CDs is that exception to the first sale doctrine, the one that says you can "sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy" without copyright owner permissions does not fully apply to CDs, has an exception to the exception.
The exception to the exception says that for copies of computer programs and musical sound recordings the outer exception does not apply to disposing of possession by "rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending" when it is "for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage". So for CDs if you want to lend them make sure it is not for commercial advantage.
BTW, the exception to the exception also has an exception, making it not apply to embedded systems and console games. (There are also exceptions for libraries).
Everyone has an inherent right to free speech and we have only chosen to temporarly not use it to encourage the creation of more useful science and art. If we decide we are no longer getting a fair deal we can choose to excercise our right to free speech again and poof goes your copyright and other imaginary property. Or we can set reasonable limits again so that everyone benefits.
This interminable argument has been raging at least since the days of the East India Company, I'm sure even Jesus had some thoughts on the preferential relationship the money changers had with the temple. It makes the world go round. All the wealth used to train these models comes from compatible relationships between power and creativity, and we rely on that compatibility. That a regime to lock out US vendors from European infrastructure contracts was even necessary is too fresh a story to reduce it to a complaint as boring as regulatory capture, go ask the folk in Greenland for their thoughts.
As opposed to what? Companies that steal the collective intellect and intellectual property of the entire world? Yeah, what a great alternative. A world where all of your hard work is blatantly stolen.
Ah yes, a red herring, plus my favorite HN hypocrisy, all in one comment.
The 'information wants to be free' crowd complaining about protecting intellectual property now that it threatens their income stream...has to give the patent trolls and the RIAA a delicious bit of schadenfreude.
I invented this react button style with 8px border radius, ChatGPT stole it from me, I want rents!
Among Americans, it appears that, if you're a college-educated white collar worker (champagne socialist), hippie degrowther, big tech alarmist, or just a left-leaning urbanism enthusiast (the current reddit/hn audience) you want the entire world to become the fantasy version of Europe you have in your head...so anything Europe does is the best thing thats ever happened, regardless of objective reality.
Or if you're the opposite, you think the EU is essentially playing out the collapse of USSR-lite in slow motion. I'd say I'm closer to this camp just looking at the financial situation, as someone actually living in the EU.
Is either position entirely rational? No.
I personally want Mistral to succeed. But this cannot happen unless we accurately assess the situation and objectively discuss the quality of their offerings compared to the alternatives, as well as the way that Europe is doing everything in its power to kill any intra-country cooperation or private sector innovation.
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