Mistral AI

On ToTheMoon, Mistral AI is the footnote that follows the word "Europe": the company comes up whenever the hosts ask whether the European market has a model maker of its own, and almost never as something they use themselves. The question stays the same from early episodes to late ones — can Mistral be a full foundation-model company, or is its role to be a people's model for the European Union and a candidate for acquisition.

In 2024 the verdicts diverged. Episode 005 described Mistral as well positioned to become the people's LLM for the EU, while episode 016 concluded that its models were, on the whole, not competitive. Episode 020 cited it as an example of an open model that can be fine-tuned and stripped of restrictions. Summing up the year in episode 040, the hosts recalled that a small Mistral model had matched a far larger GPT-3.5 and that Europe still had nothing else like it.

After DeepSeek the tone hardened: episode 043 called Mistral and Cohere the clear losers and doubted that investors would keep funding their valuations. Episode 048 settled on the view that Mistral would not become a full foundation company, and episode 068 and episode 073 discussed reports that Apple wanted to buy it and the broader idea that a large company could buy or license it. Episode 087 noted Mistral 3 as a European alternative still looking for its place. By 2026 the hosts were listing the company among fifty significant AI players (episode 126), and in episode 154 they counted that they had mentioned Mistral in nineteen episodes.