Mistral recently being valued at $14 billion in the previous funding appears like a steal to me, especially compared to the Anthropic and OAI valuations. Would be interesting to compare revenues and growth rates as well to put these valuations into better perspective.
Apart from that, Mistral appears to remain the only really relevant new player with European ties in the Gen AI space. Aleph Alpha is not heard of anymore and is essentially steered by the Schwarz Group now, so at least chances of an acquihire I guess.
I think the obvious question is whether they provide any differentiation beyond merely their HQ jurisdiction, since I'm sure we can all agree Turkmenistan AI would be very important for Turkmenistani government agencies too..
The difference with Turkmenistan is that the EU is the world's second largest economy. Having a near-monopoly on that is better than fighting over the largest economy.
>The difference with Turkmenistan is that the EU is the world's second largest economy
I don't think that was unclear to anyone - again, I'm sure some EU entities might want EU related AI companies more than they care about any other features, just as some Turkmenistani entities would prefer Turkmenistan AI. I hope the point about why that advantage is banausic here is more clear, now.
Besides those EU entities, do these companies offer any advantages compared to American or Chinese AI companies for the entire rest of the world? Licensing, rankings in specific benchmarks, etc?
They get translation in many languages right (which is important in Europe). They do not offer general purpose GenAI yet. But as they provide models for translation and text editing they have gained the trust of many companies. If they now move towards agentic AI for administrative task, they for sure have chances in procurement.
Engineers aren't the target audience for Lovable. I see it being used by designers and product managers, and also solopreneur type people, or non-technical folks wanting to build websites or start companies.
One PM I know uses it for designing prototypes then handing them off to the engineering team who then continue them in Claude Code etc.
So it's sorta of competing with Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and also prototyping tools like Figma.
I just couldn't love it, and frankly I don't get the hype around it. I recently found that all my use cases can be served by either:
1. A general purpose LLM chat interface with high reasoning capacity (GPT-5 thinking on web is my go to for now)
2. An agent that has unrestricted token consumption running on my machine (Claude Code with Opus and Amp are my go to for now).
3. A fine-tuned, single purpose LLM like v0 that is really good at one thing, in this case at generating a specific UI component with good design aesthetics from a wireframe in a sandbox.
Everything else seems like getting the worst of all worlds.
Apart from that, Mistral appears to remain the only really relevant new player with European ties in the Gen AI space. Aleph Alpha is not heard of anymore and is essentially steered by the Schwarz Group now, so at least chances of an acquihire I guess.