Time will be the ultimate judge but Mistral's Co-founder/CEO is still committing to be a leading provider of open weight models [1]:
> Clarifying a couple of things since we’re reading creative interpretations of our latest announcements:
- We’re still committed to leading open-weight models! We ask for a little patience, 1.5k H100s only got us that far.
- We have a reselling agreement with Microsoft, that we’re very excited about. Alongside similar partnerships, it will accelerate our growth.
- Microsoft invested in a small convertible note alongside many other companies, as a distribution partner. We are an independent European company with global ambitions, that part is not changing either.
> We’re seeing some interest for Le Chat and Mistral Large, on both la Plateforme and Azure, and we’ll be iterating fast!
Statements like these are only a momentary snapshot. As soon as sufficiently money is at stake the board might change their tune overnight. The whole Altman-fired-from-OpenAI-then-reinstated drama should be warning enough.
In my opinion, Altman's permanent departure would have been the death of OpenAI. After the majority of the staff threatened their resignation from OpenAI, Altman became the one holding all the leverage. I'd rather guess that OpenAI's board made him a once-in-a-lifetime offer to persuade him to come back.
> Clarifying a couple of things since we’re reading creative interpretations of our latest announcements:
- We’re still committed to leading open-weight models! We ask for a little patience, 1.5k H100s only got us that far.
- We have a reselling agreement with Microsoft, that we’re very excited about. Alongside similar partnerships, it will accelerate our growth.
- Microsoft invested in a small convertible note alongside many other companies, as a distribution partner. We are an independent European company with global ambitions, that part is not changing either.
> We’re seeing some interest for Le Chat and Mistral Large, on both la Plateforme and Azure, and we’ll be iterating fast!
[1] https://twitter.com/arthurmensch/status/1762818733016322168