Mistral's $3.5B Raise, Samsung Profit up 18x from AI Memory

0:00Samsung is set to post an 18x profit jump because of AI memory demand. And Mistral AI is looking at a$3.5 billion raise and a$23 billion valuation. Their revenue has hit over$400 million. And MidJourney is asking Disney, Universal, and Warner Brothers to disclose their own AI use because there's a bunch of lawsuits and everyone is accusing MidJourney of using copyrighted content. So they're trying to flip the tables here. Station F's FAI Accelerator is coming back. Their first cohort got$34 million in pre-seed funding. and we're going to see what's happening next there. Fable 5 has just reached the top of the kernel bench mega.

0:41That is a benchmark. And this is at the same time that AI agents are quadrupling, going 4x on real freelance work, what they're actually able to accomplish. So we're going to talk about some of the capabilities of Fable 5, what this new benchmark is saying. Currently, Claude Cowork is my absolute favorite tool for getting things done, being able to tell it to accomplish a task and it being able to control your Chrome browser, use all of the files on your computer and basically get everything done that you need to with logged in sessions is absolutely incredible. Adding MCPs is the best thing I've ever been able to do for it.

1:12The only problem with Claude is that it doesn't have image, audio or video AI capabilities. Of course, it's super smart and great at code, but I need so many different assets for all of my projects that I'm working on, whether I'm making websites and I need images inside of them, or I'm doing ads and I need video creation for all of that. Or if I'm doing things with podcasting, I have a lot of AI autonomous podcast projects and I need audio. I built an MCP for my startup AI box.ai that lets you get all of the audio image and video right inside of Claude. So this morning I was talking to Claude, I need to make a podcast cover for something.

1:45And I said, go use the AI box image generator use, you know, open AI image 1.5, but you could say anything, right? You could say Gemini 3.5 pro whatever. And I said, go and make an image, you know, go make a podcast cover. And I explained exactly the the prompt that I was used for making podcast covers. It just used the MCP connected to AI box generated the image gave me a link and I could go download it immediately. This is the biggest unlock for Claude. If you want to try out the MCP that I've created for Claude, go to AI box.ai slash Claude. I'll leave that in the description. And you get access to all of that for like$8 a month, you can have all of the image audio video inside of Claude call it at any time with AI boxes, MCP, it's absolutely incredible, super useful.

2:27And I hope that unlocks Claude for you. Samsung is expecting to have profits that are 18 times higher than they were a year ago. And of course, the biggest reason is AI, but specifically, the demand has exploded for something called high bandwidth memory or HBM. So essentially, you could think of this as ultra fast memory, and it's stacked into layers and attached directly into AI chips. Nvidia and AMD are both using this. So this is like memory that's bolted straight onto their processors. And it essentially lets AI models process, tons of data really fast, it gives them that speed. So a couple years ago, the entire memory industry had completely crashed, I think 2023 to 2024, prices were falling because there was way too much supply.

3:10So they basically overbuilt. But then all of a sudden, we had this perfect moment where opening Microsoft, Google, Amazon meta, all of them started buying up AI hardware in just insane quantities, hundreds of 1000s of chips at a time. And so the whole market has switched now. All of a sudden, instead of this big oversupply that we had before, we now have a massive undersupply. And so the market is skyrocketing. And any of these companies that are building this memory are making a ton of money. So Samsung was initially behind, I think, the biggest competitor, which is SK Hinnix. This is from South Korea.

3:39And I think I've talked about them on other podcasts before. But they are also benefiting from this a ton. And so now Samsung is kind of coming right behind them. Now they're ramping up production. And there's two things in particular, there's the HBM4, and that's basically becoming one of the biggest drivers of their kind of financial boom that they're seeing right now. That one's really popular. And the reason why this matters is that the HBM is super profitable. It sells for way more than any traditional compute memory, and only three companies in the world can manufacture at scale. So Samson, SK Hinnix, and Micron, which I think Micron is out of Idaho.

4:15And, you know, I've also talked about them on the podcast before, because they are absolutely blowing up. So there's really just three main companies that are making this right now. And it's really hard to manufacture this at scale. So all of them are growing in a crazy amount. Micron is not a company. I think that was a household name, but it's becoming one of the biggest companies in the world because of just this huge supply pinch and shortage. And so the prices are just going up a ton. Samsung is also trying to become less dependent on memory. They're going to be expanding into custom AI chips.

4:43They're also reportedly in discussions right now with Anthropic about building specialized AI processors. And they said specifically that they want to grow their semiconductor manufacturing business as well. So I mean, right now, obviously, it's super exciting for them. They're seeing a ton of benefit from all of the memory exploding. But they know that this isn't going to last forever, probably. So the diversification is a pretty smart move. Mistral AI right now is looking to raise$3.5 billion at a$23 billion valuation. And that is nearly double its September 2025 25 series C price. So they're based in France, if you didn't know already.

5:17And their recurring revenue just hit$400 million in February. That's about 20x the$20 million that they had a year ago, which is pretty crazy. And I think what's interesting about them in particular is we hear talk a lot, I think, especially after Trump kind of banned Fable 5 or the Trump administration, whatever, had to get pulled back for a little bit before it went out. We had a lot of different players, especially in Europe, talking about AI sovereignty and AI infrastructure more than I think I've seen other places. And I've had, you know, some of the big founders from like cohere on the podcast who talks a lot about that as well.

5:49But I think AI sovereignty is a huge deal for countries that are not in the United States. And they want to make sure that they're putting their investments into companies that will help them achieve that. And Mistral is a good one because they have open source models. So people can run those, you know, locally inside their own country with data centers inside their own country and really get that quote-unquote AI sovereignty that a lot of these countries are looking for. Right now, Mistral says that they're targeting$1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year, and they're committing$4 billion to build data centers in France, Sweden.

6:20And they're also launching Mistral Compute, which is a European NVIDIA-powered platform, and they're going to be doing that this year, following after what it seems like XAI and OpenAI and Google and all of them are kind of doing with their compute platforms. They have acquired a bunch of infrastructure startups. One in particular is called Kyob. They have a joint venture with MGX, NVIDIA, and BPI France to build an AI campus near Paris. I think they're really trying to show, and I think Paris and France in general is really trying to show that they are kind of the center for AI. They're really trying to get on top of all of that.

6:54Mistral's revenue mix right now, I think, really skews heavily to enterprise and government. So it's not consumer chat, right? Most people are using ChatGPT or Claude for that. They're copying Palantir's playbook. They have a bunch of forward deployed engineers that are helping different companies run models on their own infrastructure. They have something called Forge. And so they're kind of copying this forward deployed engineer strategy. Midjourney is asking Disney, Universal, and Warner Brothers to disclose their internal AI training practices as part of a big copyright lawsuit that's happening right now.

7:25All of those different studios are actually suing Midjourney in particular. And I think they're trying to like flip the tables because basically if Midjourney can prove that all of those studios are training on unlicensed content too, because all of them are have different AI programs, then I think they say, look, this is just the industry norm, you guys are all doing it as well. This isn't just us as a startup. And they could probably try to get this whole thing thrown out. The three studios combined have a market cap of about$400 billion. They've all sued Midjourney last year, because I think it was Midjourney was able to reproduce Bart Simpson and Darth Vader.

7:57And they're like, look, if you can produce that, then you're obviously training on our own, you know, Disney special data or whatever universal special data, our characters, Bart Simpson and Darth Vader. And so anyways, this lawsuit has been going on for a while, I think they're all expected to get a payout. But I think at this point, Midjourney is trying to just point the finger back at them. Judge previously limited the studio disclosure to AI usage that produced consumer facing content. Midjourney wants that boundary erased to access all internal AI workflows and training data data. I've personally seen all of those different studios talk about using AI for pre-visualization, storyboarding, and things like VFX iteration, but they haven't really disclosed what they're training all their data in order to create those tools with.

8:39So I think MidJourney is hoping that they'll be able to catch them in basically the same training data that everyone's using, which is kind of the whole internet, and say, look, you guys are doing it as well. Okay. A company called Station F's FAI Accelerator is launching their second cohort this September. They have 20 different AI startups from the first batch that all were actually able to raise$34 million in pre-seed funding. This is a Paris hub and they're positioning themselves as kind of Europe's answer to Silicon Valley. And to be honest, I've actually of all the countries in Europe, I think England's doing quite well and France is doing quite well.

9:12They have Mistral, kind of their big breakout AI company, and they're trying to get more. So they're trying to build these accelerators and these incubators and really grow some companies inside of their country. They're targeting a million euros in revenue per startup within six months. This is basically they're trying to respond to a bunch of investors that are criticizing European startups, saying that they're way slower than American companies to actually commercialize. There's been a lot of incredible European startups. I mean, you got lovable, you got lots of amazing, you know, synthesia for video generation, you got 11 labs for audio.

9:44I mean, you have some of the most, you know, some of the most prolific AI companies coming out of Europe. And I think France is trying to really concentrate them all into their country. 80 % of the first cohort that came out of this were founders that had been entrepreneurs before. About a third of them have PhDs. That's something that I would expect a lot more out of founders coming out of Europe and America. That's probably less common, although when it comes to AI researchers, I mean, that's usually who's in that kind of cohort of people. The second cohort, they're going to add six new partners.

10:12They're going to have 11 labs, Open Router, GitHub, HubSpot that are all joining that. They also have Anthropic, AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Mistral AI that are all part of their partnership program. I'll be excited to see what AI startups come out of this program. Okay, Fable just hit a big new milestone. Their new system topped the KernelBenchMega benchmark. It is able to write highly optimized CUDA code that is about 19 times faster than what their baseline was before. It even beat Claude Opus. And basically that means that AI is getting a lot better at optimizing the software that powers GPUs.

10:45At the same time, AI agents are becoming way more capable at basically every job that can be done in the real world. on a benchmark that is basically like basically what it's doing is measuring paid freelance work, things like 3d modeling, architecture, animation, it does also a lot of like analysis, the success rate jumping from just 2.5 % to 16.1 % in only eight months is really impressive. GPT 5.5 only scored 6.3%. So fable is absolutely crushing that with 16.1%. Researchers also tested AI on much longer compute tasks that take over an hour to complete. And while today, right now, the models are really struggling with that, they are getting a lot better.

11:27And while optimizing code for GPUs might not be everybody's use case for fable five, I'm really excited and really impressed. I've personally used it to do a lot of projects that Opus 4.8 just couldn't do. I have an app that I'm building. And the widgets on the app, I literally was just pulling my hair out for two days because Opus 4.8, I couldn't figure out how to make them customizable. And I sent I pointed Fable 5 at them. And in two hours, it was able to get the whole thing sorted out and working correctly. So I think like overall Fable 5, a lot of people are like, oh, it feels just like Opus.

11:58I think it's much smarter and maybe it's like 15 or 20 percent better. But that 15 or 20 percent makes a huge difference. And it's really good, especially when it's, you know, just being able to get things done much faster. A lot of complex tasks. It's great at doing them because I am so close to hitting 200 reviews on the podcast. If you haven't left a review yet, it would mean the absolute world to me if you could drop a review. I read them. They give me the motivation to keep going. I appreciate them all. If you haven't done it yet, I would be eternally grateful. Make sure to go check out AI box.ai slash MCP if you want to get access to audio image video all inside of Claude or OpenAI or Cursor or any of these other tools that take MCP.

12:39guys super excited about that go check it out there's a link in the description i'll catch you all in the next episode