> Markets, left to their own devices, do not end up automatically being competitive in favor of consumers.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
There is regulation that is effective and useful (e.g. plenty of consumer protection laws) and regulation that actually makes markets more competitive and efficient. Then there is a lot of what EU is doing which leads to less efficient markets and more stagnation.
Even a lot of their attempts to increase competitiveness like forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores have been halfassed and not very effective.
We heard this since Uber days and all it did was break the old taxi systems and brought taxi service to a wider audience. As a consumer I benefited immensely from Uber.
Likewise for AirBnB and hotels.
Not saying that these don't have secondary effects on the society - but as a consumer they were and arguably still are pretty amazing.
Me and quite a few others are getting real tired of the constant name-dropping of mega-corporations that do not care about your safety, health, or well-being. This does not resonate with anyone except a small circle of wealthy tech elitists.
If they can make a profit from those things, great, but they will also not hesitate to make a profit from your suffering as well. Ask the lung doctors of the people living next to xAI's data centers if their patients are better off than before.
You benefitted temporarily. Those offering the service are often worse off. Various regulatory bodies had to beat these companies into submission, that no, you cannot hire all your employees as contract workers and deprive them of their benefits. After the competition is murdered, they will raise their prices over and over again.
All these companies thrive on the externalization of costs and killing an economy to then use their monopoly position to maximize money extraction.
I think in this case, the contract workers are the ones taking the L, generally. Taxis are not overpriced just from a lack of competition, but because they are an actual full time job with all that comes along with it, and not well.. part time gamified bullshit where you fight for scraps.
Most of the does EU has Uber now, and Wolt and some others, so it's not like we avoided anything there in practice though.
The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.
Apple is in an entirely different market than Mistral (consumer electronics vs AI lab focusing on enterprise consulting). Which obviously means their optimal strategies are different. It doesn't really matter for Apple if it's Gemini or other model running behind their AI features. If anything it saves them a lot of money and provides a lot of flexibility.
Realistically they will have to deploy the Chinese models or their finetuned versions though since their models are completely out of date and not competitive. Outside of maybe government contracts it will be hard to compete against Azure/AWS who promise to run their models in EU datacenters and not store any data since actual companies normally prefer frontier models with decent performance (cost/performance is pretty decent as well if you are fine with e.g. Luna which is massively better than anything Mistral can offer).
There are two separate issues here. One of which is very simple. That issue is where to run the models. For many companies this has to be in the EU, on EU terms. Mostly, this is not really optional from a compliance point of view. It's why all the big cloud providers have data centers in places like Frankfurt, Amsterdam, etc. and why a lot of new data centers are being built in Ireland. Of course a lot of those investments are being made by US companies. But they all have legal entities in the EU because otherwise they'd have no business here. And they can't afford to miss out on that business because it's a huge market.
The second one is about which model to run and who controls and oversees quality control. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to insist that only they can do that. But of course here in the EU we see that a bit differently. The big US based hyper-scalers are neither liked nor trusted here at this point. We don't trust the Chinese model makers much either. But with open weight models, we can at least pick different models and run them on our own terms.
Also, what most companies need is not necessarily the latest fashionable model straight from the Silicon Valley cat walk but something that will work reliably and predictably for years. Factories are not going to install the latest model in their production lines every few weeks. Same with most banks, insurers, etc. I actually know people that do business with those in relation to AI development in Germany. Companies like that are very much obsessing about self hosting their models. Sending customer data off premises is a big concern for them. They are building stuff that will be used for many years. In five years, nobody will care which model was best in autumn of 2026. But a lot of software built this year that uses AI might still be running.
You have to see Mistral's investment in that context. They could make a lot of money in the EU if they do a decent enough job. Lots of conservative companies here that are going to pick something that's good enough and then they'll be using that for many years.
"something that will work reliably and predictably for years" is not really the class of product being sold, unless you're using a fine-tuned SLM to do something like classification. The vast majority of work being done with AI unfortunately benefits from being run on the biggest/best model.
Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.
Long-context agentic tasks and Rust engineering are our use cases where Kimi definitely is better than Sol. We can measure our own systems and the numbers say that Sol has no chance against K3 or Opus, and K3 is so so so much cheaper than Opus right now.
You cannot just look at the price tags for these models, you must eval and see the price per task. In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results. Kimi does not have these issues, it's just as good as Opus with a smaller price tag.
China's 50 Cent Party being a real and noticeable thing (and the two biggest things they like to shill is open weight Chinese models and the futility of resisting a Taiwan invasion), I have to take things like this with a healthy dose of skepticism without corroborating data, since independent evals didn't show the price per task lead you're showing.
If there's independent data showing this feel free to share a link, I haven't seen it. DeepSWE has been most closely matching what I see in my own use.
Internal reports from company? Maybe not. I'm just saying you have to eval eval eval if you are working in this industry. There's a ton of victories in price, and price is right now the key thing all the customers are talking about.
It's not always Chinese models. For example GLM 5.2 just did not work for us at all. And Gemini is still the best cheap model for non-text agents.
If you don't have a good eval set and if you don't check the models weekly, you are missing on things. And Opus 4.8 is still the absolute quality king for agentic tasks. Too bad it's so expensive.
And the clearest thing here is that Fable, Opus, and Sol are all too expensive. I'd say a healthy 75% cut to token prices and they are back in competition.
Yep. It's a bit scary also. There's a lot of opportunity in the market now, but the downfall of the big US inference labs is going to hurt here in EU too sadly...
20 perhaps, but just about. Probably not 10 years and certainly not 5 years ago (obviously they are way faster now, but from the perspective of normal users running software designed based on the constraints of the hardware available at the time)
Or people could just stop buying Mars bars and other ultra-processed foods if they feel they are overpriced which would force corporations to adjust their policies. Mars, Nestle, McDonalds etc. will continue increasing prices as long as people keep buying regardless of how much they complain.
The pricing of normal raw food products, produce etc. is generally quite transparent.
>Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow. There's a reason that half of all towns in New England have the name "field" in them. The impenetrable thicket that characterizes unmaintained New England land would have been foreign to literally every human to ever set foot there prior to the mid 1700s (decades of re-growth after the natives had been mostly driven off but not long enough for complete cultivation by europeans).
Now, obviously that's not that far inland, but by the time you're talking about the french surveying the continental interior native populations had stabilized. The worst disease epidemics were very much at 1500s and early 1600s thing.
It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow.
Have you ever seen a cleared lot that hasn’t been touched for a decade? We have a few near my house, and it is fascinating how wild they have gotten in such a short time.
Multiplied 10x and set in the rainforest, I would expect signs of humanity to be completely hidden.
Amazon is different beast, humidity, insect fast growing plants. It is nasure on hyperdrive. I wouldn't be surprised if things took 5-10 times faster than england. Or any more dry european places.
Yeah, i spend some time in south america and you can see that even in Rio. If people left the nature would just gulp it up. fun time sleeping in jungle in Iquitos, its crazy how dens the jungle can be
The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).
Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.
Not as common as old England but vastly more common than the rest of the country because the charters had to be petitioned for and approved by several layers of intolerable assholes so unoffensive descriptive names like <thing>field were preferred over just about everything else. See also North/South/East/West<thing that was previously approved>. Kind of like how modern corporate safe culture bland-washes everything.
They mostly gave all the waterways colloquial names based on the Indians and of course that got copy-pasta'd onto all sorts of charts and maps so the government couldn't redefine those even if they wanted to.
Most of the rest of the country (including the mid Atlantic despite being settled at the same time) was far more deliberately surveyed and named.
True. Does not mean all regulation is increases competition and marker efficiency by default. If anything EU has long abandoned the core tenets of Ordoliberalism and "Social Market Economy"
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