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Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

mistral.ai

21–30 of 444 posts

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#21
post #11

Benchmarks suggest this model loses to Deepseek-R1 in every one-shot comparison. Considering they were likely not even pitting it against the newer R1 version (no mention of that in the article) and at more than double the cost, this looks like the best AI company in the EU is struggling to keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Europe isn't going to catch up in tech as long as its market is open to US tech giants. Tech doesn't have marginal costs, so you want to have one of it in one place and sell it everywhere and when the infra and talent is already in US, EU tech is destined to do niche products.

UK has a bit of it, France has some and that's it. The only viable alternatives are countries who have issues with US and that is China and Russia. China have come up with strong competitors and it is on cutting edge.

Also, it doesn't have anything to do with regulations. 50 US States have the American regulations, its all happening in 1 and some other states happen to host some infrastructure but that's true for rest of of the world too.

If the EU/US relationship gets to Trump/Musk level, then EU can have the cutting edge stuff.

Most influential AI researchers are from Europe(inc. UK), Israel and Canada anyway. Ilya Sutskever just the other day gave speech at his alma matter @Canada for example. Andrej Karpathy is Slovakian. Lot's of Brits, French, Polish, Chinese, German etc. are among the pioneers. Significant portion of the talent is non-American already, they just need a reason to be somewhere else than US to have it outside the US. Chinese got their reason and with the state of the affairs in the world I wouldn't be surprised if Europeans gets theirs in less than 3 and a half years.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#22
post #11

Benchmarks suggest this model loses to Deepseek-R1 in every one-shot comparison. Considering they were likely not even pitting it against the newer R1 version (no mention of that in the article) and at more than double the cost, this looks like the best AI company in the EU is struggling to keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Thought so too. I don't know how it could be different though. They are competing against behemoths like OpenAI or Google, but have only 200 people. Even Anthropic has over 1000 people. DeepSeek has less than 200 people so the comparison seems fair.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#23
post #11

Benchmarks suggest this model loses to Deepseek-R1 in every one-shot comparison. Considering they were likely not even pitting it against the newer R1 version (no mention of that in the article) and at more than double the cost, this looks like the best AI company in the EU is struggling to keep up with the state-of-the-art.

Even if it isn't as capable, having a model with control over training is probably strategically important for every major region of the world. But it could only fall so far behind before it effectively doesn't work in the eyes of the users.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#24
post #11

Benchmarks suggest this model loses to Deepseek-R1 in every one-shot comparison. Considering they were likely not even pitting it against the newer R1 version (no mention of that in the article) and at more than double the cost, this looks like the best AI company in the EU is struggling to keep up with the state-of-the-art.

"EU is leading in regulation", they say. I don't know what they are thinking.

It is fairly common to struggle to understand why different cultures think the way they do.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"EU is leading in regulation", they say. I don't know what they are thinking.

It is fairly common to struggle to understand why different cultures think the way they do.

Ugh.

Edit: Parent changed their comment significantly, from something quite unpleasant to what it is now. I'm not deleting my comment as I'm not that kind of person.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#28
post #19

The featured accuracy benchmarks exclude every model that matter except DeepSeek, which is quite telling about this new model's performance. This makes it yet another example of European companies building great products but fumbling marketing. Mistral's edge is speed. It's a real pleasure to use because it answers in ~1s what takes other models 5-8s, which makes for a much better experience. But instead of focusing…

That is reasonable though. Comparing the product of a small company with little resources with giants like Google and OpenAI in a field where most advances are due to more and more expensive models is nonsense.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#29

I made some GGUFs for those interested in running them at https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL or ./llama.cpp/llama-cli -hf unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL --jinja --temp 0.7 --top-k -1 --top-p 0.95 -ngl 99 Please use --jinja for llama.cpp and use temperature = 0.7, top-p 0.95! Also best to increase Ollama's context length…

Their paper https://mistral.ai/static/research/magistral.pdf is also cool! They edited GRPO via:

1. Removed KL Divergence

2. Normalize by total length (Dr. GRPO style)

3. Minibatch normalization for advantages

4. Relaxing trust region

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