The aim of this note is to announce some results about the probabilistic and deterministic asymptotic properties of linear groups. The first one is the analogue, for norms of random matrix products, of the classical theorem of Cramér on large deviation principles (LDP) for sums of iid real random variables. In the second result, we introduce a limit set describing the asymptotic shape of the powers S n = {g 1 . . . . .g n | g i ∈ S} of a subset S of a semisimple linear Lie group G (e.g. SL(d, R)). This limit set has applications, among others, in the study of large deviations.