Skip to main content

New AI news: A French national champion


We will spend this week discussing four policy issues now facing the world and its governments that are getting surprisingly little mainstream media attention because the Charlie Kirk shooting has sucked all the air out of the newsroom. Artificial intelligence as an industry, US monetary policy, US/Chinese relations and ... Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book.

First up, AI: I believe we are seeing the bursting of an AI bubble.  AI companies are not even remotely worth the values implied by their present equity prices, any more than dotcom companies were worth their stock prices in 1998. And (as then) the bursting of the bubble will have consequences for the world beyond the industry concerned. 

Case in point in very recent days, and one that you dear reader likely have not heard of: Mistral.  This is not a publicly listed company anywhere so calculations of its equity value depend on sporadic deals. On September 10 the Wall Street Journal reported that the value of a French start-up in the AI field, called Mistral (roughly meaning "dominant wind" in French) has hit US$14 billion.

This is based on the $1.5 billion that a Dutch firm that makes the machines that etch semiconductors has just paid for an 11 percent stake. I'm not sure who did the math for the WSJ here.  By my natural-intelligence calculation, the total value presumed by a $1.5 billion payment for 11%  is more like $13.6 billion.  So the $14 billion figure seems to involve some heroic rounding-up.  What's $400 million between friends, amirite?

[Actually, there may have been roundings out in the calculation of the value in dollars of the chip company's investment, which it of course made in euros.]

Anyway: Mistral was founded two years ago in Paris with the express purpose of making France and by implication continental Europe, independent of either Silicon Valley in the US or various players in the far East in connection with the development of AI.  It's value seems to be inflated not only by the general enthusiasm for all things AI and the greater-fool theory defines bubbles, but by this national-champion halo, and the expectation that it will soon reach a point in which the national government there will consider it too big and important to fail.   

We'll see how that works out. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
21 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
2 comments
Read more