[HN Gopher] France's Mistral AI raises a $113M seed round to tak...
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       France's Mistral AI raises a $113M seed round to take on OpenAI
        
       Author : rbrown
       Score  : 142 points
       Date   : 2023-06-14 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | rapsey wrote:
       | If investors are going to act this way we're gonna have a dotcom
       | level bubble.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Tremendous. Tech salaries and exuberant valuations are back on
         | the menu y'all.
        
           | synaesthesisx wrote:
           | A friend of mine just got a 7-digit offer at an AI company,
           | so yes, we are so back
        
         | Filligree wrote:
         | Oh, definitely, but keep in mind that a lot of huge companies
         | came out of the dotcom bubble. There was a lot of nonsense, but
         | quite a few well-planned products as well, some of which even
         | succeeded.
         | 
         | I think AI's going to be the same way, at least at first. Long-
         | term there's of course a possibility of takeoff, slow or fast;
         | I don't think we've excluded that yet.
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | I'm ready for this.
         | 
         | Being ahead of the game has made me some money already. When
         | Bard made a mistake, google stock dropped 10%. I bought knowing
         | that LLMs make mistakes.
         | 
         | So I made $200.
        
           | B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
           | > I made $200.
           | 
           | You filthy \w slighty soiled speculator. Another six orders
           | of magnitude, and you'll be worse than Soros.
        
         | BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
         | that's how american economics work
         | 
         | from bubble to bubble. the crypto is bust, now it's time for AI
         | to get swelling.... eventually it will pop too
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | This is France
        
           | questime wrote:
           | Crypto was a massive innovation unlike AI - I'm referring to
           | the ability to liquidate investments to retail by completely
           | bypassing securities laws. I don't think this AI wave can get
           | to the same level since it's way harder to sell the bubbly
           | assets to the next lemming. Public markets via a traditional
           | IPO won't be able to sustain this bubble.
        
       | boringg wrote:
       | People, the AI hype is all the money from crypto finding a new
       | home.
        
         | DebtDeflation wrote:
         | Good. I'd rather it be spent on something that is at least
         | creating some value than on literal ponzis and scams.
        
           | boringg wrote:
           | There some strong assumptions under there. Both promised the
           | future.
        
           | ClumsyPilot wrote:
           | Questionable. I would rather have 200k Etherium than the same
           | in OpenAI.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | satvikpendem wrote:
       | Edit, fake news, clarification here:
       | https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7066108...
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | Didn't the EU just pass an AI law that prohibits generative AI?
       | 
       | > _In a bold stroke, the EU's amended AI Act would ban American
       | companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing
       | API access to generative AI models. The amended act, voted out of
       | committee on Thursday, would sanction American open-source
       | developers and software distributors, such as GitHub, if
       | unlicensed generative models became available in Europe. While
       | the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine
       | learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for
       | open source generative systems._
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36324481
        
         | fulafel wrote:
         | No, they didn't.
         | 
         | There's an early ish phase in drafting legislation:
         | https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230609IP...
         | 
         | The NYT article behind your HN link doesn't seem to contain the
         | quoted claim (maybe it was revised?).
        
           | satvikpendem wrote:
           | Ah you're right, seems I succumbed to some fake news
           | unfortunately. I just read the LinkedIn clarifying post: http
           | s://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7066108...
        
       | rad_gruchalski wrote:
       | Well, good luck in the face of the new EU AI directive. They're
       | going to need the money to feed those bureaucrats.
        
       | espadrine wrote:
       | If I am not mistaken, their CTO and CSO had a significant impact
       | on this year's open-source LLM efforts, as they are some of the
       | LLaMA authors.
        
         | svantana wrote:
         | They are indeed, and to drive this point home (subliminally?),
         | one of them is wearing a t-shirt with a llama on it in the
         | press image.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | Nifty3929 wrote:
       | What I didn't read was a business plan. How do they plan to
       | capture a fraction of the value they create, and pass a fraction
       | of that fraction on to investors?
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | Through an IPO. Unless you talk about non-shareholder value,
         | but cares about that nowadays?
        
           | johngladtj wrote:
           | You seem confused as to what shareholders are
        
       | andromaton wrote:
       | Btw, Mistral is the name of a strong wind from France into the
       | Mediterranean sea.
        
       | nbevans wrote:
       | I'm not sure that $113M is enough? They will also need to find a
       | Tier 1 cloud partner but Azure and GCM are both taken.
        
         | pelorat wrote:
         | Indeed. With all the costs we need to deal with here in Europe
         | when running a company, there's zero chance anyone can afford
         | to roll their own hardware for this without cash from the USA
         | and that's not going to happen.
         | 
         | This company is dead before it got started. With the AI Act
         | looming over it in the future even more so.
         | 
         | But maybe they will survive, by going to the USA.
        
           | kramerger wrote:
           | What is this hostility towards non-US companies I see on HN??
           | 
           | EU has a lot of small-medium companies in both AI and cloud
           | and they are doing just fine. If anything, they are better at
           | adapting to regulations compared to, say, openAI...
           | 
           | https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65708114
        
             | veave wrote:
             | Better at adapting to regulations is not the positive point
             | that you think it is.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | Because not being able to gets you what? A fraud trial
               | (SBF and FTX), and SEC law suites (Coinbase and Binance)?
        
           | naiv wrote:
           | Maybe they will team up with OVH
        
       | dopamean wrote:
       | > It's very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be
       | doing -- it's only around a month old -- but from what Mensch
       | said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available
       | data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over
       | training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their
       | own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as
       | well.
       | 
       | Unless I missed it elsewhere in the article this part really
       | glosses over something I have a hard time understanding. 113M
       | seed round at a 240M valuation for a company that has no product
       | yet and a plan to build something like something else that
       | already exists. This feels insane to me.
        
         | TechBro8615 wrote:
         | This is total speculation, but maybe there is some kind of deal
         | with the French government on the table.
        
         | geodel wrote:
         | Somewhere in their offices they be putting quote from Neils
         | Bohr to pat on their back :)
         | 
         |  _We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question
         | which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance
         | of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy
         | enough._
        
         | Nasrudith wrote:
         | To be frank my first instinct is "slush fund" from the start
         | just because they are appealing to nationalism first. Starting
         | off with a thought terminator is a mark of a deceiver.
         | 
         | Edit: I mean would you expect anything less than a slushfund or
         | grift from an "America AI" project?
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | What makes this different from what stabilityAI is doing?
        
         | elcomet wrote:
         | They're investing in the team, which I think is smarter than
         | investing in an idea. Those people built llama at meta and
         | flamingo/chinchilla at deepmind.
        
           | adamsmith143 wrote:
           | You should throw all your money in then. Meanwhile teams with
           | good people who also have a good product are going to eat
           | them for lunch.
        
             | anyoneamous wrote:
             | You are ignoring how protectionist France is - a native
             | company will basically get first refusal for any government
             | work.
        
           | dopamean wrote:
           | I get that. Call me old fashioned but if I were investing a
           | hundred million dollars I'd like the team to build
           | _something_ for me first. Maybe that's why I dont have a
           | hundred million to invest lol.
        
             | eyphka wrote:
             | If something is already built, why do they need your
             | hundred million?
        
             | ivalm wrote:
             | It costs like $50M to build a next gen model, so if what
             | they want to pitch is training next gen models it makes
             | sense they get $100M to try. Similar to Hippocratic AI $50M
             | seed raise. If anything this founder team seems more legit.
        
               | iancmceachern wrote:
               | Interesting, what is the bulk of the cost? Programmer
               | labor? Data center time?
        
               | dougSF70 wrote:
               | GPU...H100 arent cheap and you need lots of them. And
               | some where to keep them cool.
        
               | atlasunshrugged wrote:
               | RE: Hippocratic AI, interesting Forbes piece about the
               | founder out a day or two ago
               | 
               | https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2023/06/12/law
               | sui...
        
               | ivalm wrote:
               | I talked to Munjal and team when they were ideating on
               | Hippocratic, even he acknowledges that healthiq was a
               | shit show. AFAIK it was 30 people running a 1k person
               | call center and failing. This motivated Hippocratic as
               | they think they can do AI-based call center replacement
               | because they were so burned out of running human-staffed
               | call centers.
               | 
               | I think Hippocratic is interesting because their
               | leadership is business focused and not very technical,
               | while a lot of other new foundational model cos are led
               | by technical people. I'm curious how this shakes out.
        
           | version_five wrote:
           | Google, Facebook and others spent billions buying the best ML
           | people and giving them the best, and got scooped badly by
           | OpenAI. And I know it's a cliche but lots of better
           | engineered "iphone/ipod" products existed that got destroyed
           | by apple. Unless they can invest in the man himself - a Jobs
           | or Altman, I don't think investing in a good team is an
           | automatic road to victory.
        
             | acchow wrote:
             | I don't think I'm acquainted with "better engineered iphone
             | products existed". Care you share about it?
        
               | AuryGlenz wrote:
               | Yeah. iPod I might agree with, though the interface on
               | the device itself was pretty top tier. iPhone? Nah.
        
             | plonk wrote:
             | > better engineered "iphone/ipod" products existed that got
             | destroyed by apple
             | 
             | Do you mean Nokia's phones?
        
               | madrox wrote:
               | Nothing can destroy Nokia phones
        
               | evbogue wrote:
               | It's true. I had a Nokia phone in 2003 that survived
               | being thrown in the washer and the dryer before I noticed
               | it was missing.
        
               | frumper wrote:
               | No one wants a dirty phone.
        
               | user432678 wrote:
               | Except that ex-Microsoft manager...
        
             | littlestymaar wrote:
             | I don't think you can even remotely compare Jobs and Altman
             | here, especially given how badly he missmanaged the
             | enormous advance OpenAI had with Dall-E. In fact, he was
             | lucky to have midjourney and stable diffusion kicking his
             | ass on image generation and pushing him to actually release
             | a product, otherwise Anthropic and Llama could have done
             | the same on the LLM side.
        
               | WanderPanda wrote:
               | You forget that OpenAI wasn't supposed to have products
               | in the first place
        
           | pera wrote:
           | It's funny, the comments here reminded me to this other
           | submission (from 2014):
           | 
           |  _Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for
           | $400M_
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127938
           | 
           | > $400M for a company I've never heard before is quite
           | surprising
           | 
           | > If the article is correct, they bought the team.
        
             | Barrin92 wrote:
             | Especially on HN it's pretty common for people to
             | retroactively justify these kinds of decisions based on
             | results, but it always reminds me of an article I read a
             | few years ago
             | (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/western-elite-
             | chi...)
             | 
             |  _" When I was an intern, in one of the training
             | presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish
             | between the process and the results. He said that we should
             | focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the
             | result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he
             | said, we don't punish people for losing money for the right
             | reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked
             | him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the
             | wrong reason?"_
             | 
             | Just like that old Dropbox comment that people love to
             | bring up, you can make a gazillion dollars off a bad bet,
             | and you can lose following a good strategy, that's the case
             | everywhere probabilities are involved. Outcomes don't
             | determine if the original evaluation was sound or not.
        
               | talldatethrow wrote:
               | I've been around for a while and don't know of a famous
               | dropbox comment? Curious to hear it if someone can
               | answer. Thanks
        
               | wasimanitoba wrote:
               | it's this comment where the user suggests that dropbox
               | will never be successful because it's "trivial":
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753850
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
        
               | pera wrote:
               | I agree and just to clarify: I don't think/know whether
               | this startup will be successful or not, in fact I don't
               | even know if buying DeepMind was a good investment for
               | Google (financially speaking). I only mentioned it
               | because the comments were very similar.
        
           | kpw94 wrote:
           | "the team" here seems to be a trio of research
           | scientists/data scientists? (Some famous in their research
           | community bubble)
           | 
           | Competent product/sales person, and engineering person seems
           | missing for this to succeed. Especially if they used to rely
           | on the eng infrastructure of giants.
           | 
           | They seem smart folks so probably can cover the software
           | engineering gap, especially with $100m to outsource some of
           | the hard problems to some cloud infra.
           | 
           | But I'd be more confident if they had started with a co-
           | founder that's more product/sales oriented.
        
           | boringg wrote:
           | That's a real lofty move. Many incredibly intelligent and
           | talented people are incapable of producing products that
           | work.
           | 
           | An example of a company that did that is all the Google X
           | products - smart people not many great outcomes and a ton of
           | capital.
        
             | ska wrote:
             | Why are you proposing they chose the team because they were
             | "smart" rather than because they "ship things", as per GP
             | comment?
        
         | papruapap wrote:
         | Speech 100, at least the ceo have job security. Jokes aside, I
         | wonder why people think that public available means copyleft.
        
         | konschubert wrote:
         | EU politics.
        
         | mach1ne wrote:
         | Maybe there's enough money in Europe that investors who were
         | anxious to join the AI train jumped the gun. Indeed the whole
         | thing is sketchy.
        
         | rjzzleep wrote:
         | Looks like the crypto grifting moved on the generative AI.
        
           | shrimpx wrote:
           | It won't be on the same level until there's a consumer
           | investor frenzy, for which there's no vehicle yet.
        
       | atleastoptimal wrote:
       | Ahhhh the French, tech grift, has always been celebrated for its
       | excellence. There is a California tech grift, by Marcus
       | Andreessen, inspired by that same French excellence. It's built
       | on generative AI and like the best French tech grift, it's highly
       | speculative.
        
       | Ecstatify wrote:
       | Vaporware.
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | I guarantee that AI will have it's own best fraudulent company
       | like the rest of the other startups in each of their industry
       | sectors: Theranos (for Healthcare), WeWork (in general), FTX (for
       | crypto) and Nikola (for electric vehicles).
       | 
       | All thanks to the continued unjustified and extreme seed funding
       | rounds and over-valued companies like this especially with no
       | product or any proof other than 'the team'.
        
         | Multiplayer wrote:
         | Fan of wework here. As a longtime happy customer I do not
         | believe they belong in a list of fraudulent companies.
         | 
         | They still enable me to walk into any major city and have a
         | nice office to work out of and I appreciate them for that. They
         | changed the real estate game for startups and solopreneurs and
         | should be commended for this!
        
           | Sai_ wrote:
           | Yeah, the wework hate is getting a bit out of hand. They
           | (well, co-working spaces) added uniformity, predictability,
           | and an international footprint to a legacy business of
           | renting office space.
        
           | nradov wrote:
           | Right, there was no "fraud" at WeWork in the legal sense. All
           | of the pillaging of investor capital was properly disclosed
           | and didn't break any laws.
        
             | johntiger1 wrote:
             | They bet big and they were wrong. It happens
        
       | stnmtn wrote:
       | The Mistral is a northernwesterly wind that blows from France
       | into the Mediterranean. Cool name for an AI startup.
        
         | George83728 wrote:
         | Kind of a strange name, but I like it.
        
         | kreig wrote:
         | Good to know, I initially tought that name was for the Nobel
         | laurate writer Gabriela Mistral.
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | It is also an Amphinious assault ship that Russia tried to buy
         | from france.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral-class_amphibious_ass...
        
         | euroclear wrote:
         | I knew this only because Nietzsche wrote a poem about it.
         | 
         | https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/An_den_Mistral
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | Also the name of a French anti-aircraft guided missile. Boom!
         | 
         | https://www.mbda-systems.com/product/mistral-manpads/
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | I read it as Mistrial three times before I figured it out.
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | Unless they are devoting that $113M to making and releasing open
       | source models a consumer can run, which seems unlikely, I see no
       | way they can succeed in building a better proprietary AI.
       | 
       | Google is already feeling the threat to their $100 Billion/year
       | business and is willing to throw massive amounts of money at AI.
       | 
       | OpenAI isn't so much a startup but should be seen as Microsoft's
       | strategic vision and as such has all the Microsoft resources to
       | push it forward. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing for
       | years in vain hoping to cut into Google's search dominance. Now
       | comes the chance to use AI to outcompete Google and they will
       | pour their resources into it.
       | 
       | With neural networks, massive amounts of data tend to overwhelm
       | any secret sauce. Google and Microsoft have access to massive
       | amounts of data as well as the hardware required to process these
       | massive amounts of data to train neural networks
       | 
       | I see this as mostly a way for a European company to ride the
       | hype wave of AI, combine that with European paranoia and envy
       | with regards to the US and make a lot of their investors rich.
        
       | karimtr wrote:
       | This looks very similar to this:
       | https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/13/element-ai-raises-151m-on-...
        
         | frankbinette wrote:
         | Sold for 230 millions to ServiceNow, still a huge blow to
         | Montreal's AI scene.
        
       | olivermarks wrote:
       | I read this by Dana Blankenhorn this morning which I think a few
       | people in France need to read.
       | 
       | This AI Boom Will Bust | The Slope of Enlightenment is Coming
       | 
       | https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/this-ai-boom-will-bu...
       | 
       | 'In the end today's AI boom is an evolution. It evolves from the
       | huge databases built by the Cloud Czars, from the technology used
       | to search those data stores, and from the ability of Graphics
       | Processing Units to turn out results quickly.'
       | 
       | The French like to go in early in tech, minitel is a good
       | example, but they almost invariably get leapfrogged by subsequent
       | waves.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
       | 
       | In the AI era who owns the data and data sanctity is an upcoming
       | legal quagmire that the big players will win. I don't see France
       | ever being a big player in this world.
        
         | Leo_Germond wrote:
         | The French atomic bomb, nuclear plants, high speed trains, and
         | planes are not getting leapfrogged though ;)
        
           | olivermarks wrote:
           | French innovation is quirky but brilliant IMO - minitel was
           | years ahead pre internet.
           | 
           | For some reason French innovation doesn't spread much beyond
           | France. Concorde (I love that plane so much) was an Anglo
           | French project. A lot of my friends parents in the UK
           | midlands were involved with at massive project, but it never
           | scaled to fleets and eventually withered away after an
           | astonishing amount was spent developing it in the '60s ($2.8
           | billion in that era's valuations).
           | 
           | Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't
           | think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical
           | or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on
           | great ideas by their countrymen.
        
             | hef19898 wrote:
             | Airbus, Dassault, just from top of my head.
             | 
             | Also, the US Navy is buying a French/Italian frigate design
             | to replace, sorry, I meant support the littoral combat
             | ships that don't work. The only reason Australia cancelled
             | the contract for French is that, all of a sudden, they got
             | nuclear ones.
        
             | artwr wrote:
             | > Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just
             | don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are
             | practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and
             | build on great ideas by their countrymen. I don't disagree
             | that these schools still need to evolve a bit, but you'd be
             | surprised at how much they've already moved in that area. I
             | know multiple people from Polytechnique are heavily
             | involved in entrepreneurship and/or AI.
        
               | olivermarks wrote:
               | I think my point is that ENA / Ecole Polytechnique people
               | are arguably harming French innovative abilities. Many US
               | entrepreneurs are grass roots college dropout types...
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | Which is better because of, reasons? US culture is
               | different from European one, and France always has been
               | peculiar.
        
               | TacticalCoder wrote:
               | Well... We're talking tech unicorns here. France ain't
               | exactly know for it's tech companies. There's what, eight
               | EU (not french, but entire EU) tech companies in the top
               | 100 tech companies worldwide?
               | 
               | The biggest EU one is german (not french), it's SAP. At
               | least two french ones are basically french militaro-
               | industrial complex / fake-private actually state-owned
               | ones, being "big" by virtue of sucking french taxpayers
               | money.
               | 
               | I don't know what France's culture is (although I'm a
               | native french speaker and typing this from France) but
               | "producing tech unicorns" certainly ain't part of it.
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | Maybe someone at this small office software shop in Seattle,
         | the one I constantly forget the name of, you know the that
         | invested some table change into an unknown AI thing, should
         | read that, too.
        
         | dizzydes wrote:
         | Agree on France, the EU is particularly rigorous in its
         | oversight of AI also. In terms of the boom/bust in the article,
         | historical patterns are useful to keep in mind, but they don't
         | dictate what will happen.
         | 
         | I can categorically say I'm a productive ChatGPT user as of
         | today. This might not apply to every industry, but for
         | developing/refactoring there is already a GDP-boost with
         | ChatGPT's name on it. Come to think of it, the AI hype-cycle
         | has been in effect for some time already no? Maybe this is the
         | productivity stage...
        
           | simion314 wrote:
           | >I can categorically say I'm a productive ChatGPT user as of
           | today. This might not apply to every industry, but for
           | developing/refactoring there is already a GDP-boost with
           | ChatGPT's name on it.
           | 
           | Really? I asked ChatGPT to code review my code and it
           | halucinated issues that did not exist.
           | 
           | I also had the idea to give it 100 lines of code to refactor
           | but after I got the response I realized that will can't trust
           | that it did not fucked up so I decided to do the cleanup
           | myself.
           | 
           | I can use it as a faster Google search to answer me soem
           | questions, but I need to always check the answers.
        
             | jdiez17 wrote:
             | Both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have gotten _considerably_ worse in
             | quality for me since the May 24 update. Yesterday I asked
             | GPT-4 to refactor some code I 'd written in haste with a
             | lot of duplication etc - a typically perfect task for a LLM
             | - and it just gave me the same code back, without comments
        
       | nradov wrote:
       | This reminds me of Quaero and later Qwant. Both were French
       | attempts to create national champion companies to compete with
       | Google and establish digital sovereignty. Quaero totally failed.
       | Qwant is still hanging on but nearly dead.
        
       | zn44 wrote:
       | giving up ~30%/40% of the shares in the seed round. That's
       | something you can regret
        
         | justrealist wrote:
         | I mean sure... but they now each have ~$30mm in (nominal)
         | equity having done 0 work. That's not a bad deal.
        
           | qeternity wrote:
           | Liq prefs are a bitch...
        
         | hospitalJail wrote:
         | I'm about to do similar...
         | 
         | Its that, or I DIY my product.
         | 
         | Either sounds fine to be honest.
        
         | dopamean wrote:
         | I imagine that's the only way to get someone to commit 100M+ in
         | a seed round though.
        
         | shmatt wrote:
         | by the time any average series E IPOs, they're all diluted like
         | crazy anyways
        
       | tin7in wrote:
       | I just listened to one of the team members next to Macron at a
       | conference in Paris and I sense that French politicians really
       | want to make this work - for protectionist reasons or just to
       | bring back French R&D in the game. With that in mind though it's
       | interesting to see that 40% of it is already owned by foreign
       | capital.
        
       | dpflan wrote:
       | $113M seed at $260M valuation -- a seed round that values the
       | company at ~2x, is that conservative or expected?
        
         | treprinum wrote:
         | $113M is like a cost of 10 full LLaMA-65B training runs.
         | Pitiful money to do any serious AI research.
        
         | tromp wrote:
         | I think it just means that the investors will hold 113/260 ~43%
         | of the shares, with the founders controlling the other 57%.
        
           | pauldix wrote:
           | Likely the 3 founders have 12% each (after a 4 year vest) and
           | the remainder (21%) goes to the option pool.
        
         | blitzar wrote:
         | 113M for ~50% of zero product and a vauge plan.
         | 
         | Seems fair enough to me, if they had a barely trained prototype
         | it probably would have been 113M for 15%.
        
         | reducesuffering wrote:
         | Seed rounds are usually 10% - 20%, I haven't heard of 43%.
        
           | questime wrote:
           | These are considered "incubated" companies - I don't think
           | these usually go well. Common in biotech though.
        
           | TechBro8615 wrote:
           | Perhaps there is more cultural willingness to surrender 50%
           | of a company when you live in France and are already used to
           | sending 50% of your income to the government. But even as an
           | American, I think I could be convinced to give up 50% of my
           | newly formed company for $113 million of runway...
        
       | treprinum wrote:
       | It feels like a typical "young & hyped" European business -
       | fanfare in the beginning, capital from old money networks that
       | want to stay relevant, then fizzling out slowly without showing
       | anything worthwhile later.
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | At least those don't leave craters of the size of FTX, WeWork
         | or Theranos. Stupid Europeans, even fail at failing!
        
           | bitcurious wrote:
           | Credit Suisse, Wirecard, WV emissions scandal? I don't think
           | corporate fraud/failure is unique to US.
        
             | hef19898 wrote:
             | We talked about young, start-up like companies. Heck,
             | Wirecard was decades old before the scandal broke.
             | 
             | Regarding European scandals, I'd throw in Siemens'
             | corruption scandal, Contergan and every other one I
             | forgot...
        
         | konschubert wrote:
         | bingo - but I hope I am wrong.
        
         | xor99 wrote:
         | exactly
        
       | klft wrote:
       | This is good news for Nvidia.
        
       | bsaul wrote:
       | I'm usually the first guy to critise french investment strategy
       | in overhyped fields.. However, in this case we have :
       | 
       | - really smart people, that really graduated from the very best
       | french schools
       | 
       | - that actually have real world experience in the top research
       | facilities in the field, in the US.
       | 
       | - that know each others very well
       | 
       | - and don't rely solely on public funding (so they will
       | definitely be held accountable for what they're doing with the
       | money).
       | 
       | This is waaaaaayyyyy above what we're used to. So, i have to say
       | : congrats to the team, and godspeed !
        
         | cowpig wrote:
         | > that really graduated from the very best french schools
         | 
         | I find it shocking when people refer to what school someone
         | went to as a credential in just about any context. I usually
         | consider it a red flag, an indication that there is no
         | functional understanding being applied in the evaluation
        
           | bsaul wrote:
           | not any context... the school they went to is specifically
           | selecting math wiz.. Which seems a bit related to the field
           | of ML (but please correct me if i'm wrong).
        
           | bigyikes wrote:
           | It's a useful heuristic that, when combined with other
           | factors, can give you increased confidence in someone's
           | ability.
        
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