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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

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Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#61

Post by GaProgMan »

antirez wrote: post #27

I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, an…

Compared to the UK Government which recently announced 10 million GBP for AI research, which will likely be scooped up by consultants. I think Europe is doing fine considering.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#62

Post by stephantul »

I was also at the event and was pretty disappointed. Most of the talks were pretty low on information. I was at the “build” stage, which supposedly was the technical stage, but the talks there didn’t really go into technical specifics.

The papyrus talk was awesome though.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#63

Post by Oras »

Sounds like they don’t have a moat at all. It’s like software consultancy with a data centre. And then the article mentions many customers using these models on prem (so data centre is not really a plus).

What’s stopping any country backed startup from fine-tuning small open source models?

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#64

Post by rhdunn »

lettergram wrote: post #21
trouve_search wrote: post #9

OK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 are currently best in the small size; Mistral's "small" model has ~4x the parameter count at 120B and isn't even competing with models a quarter i…

We actually found the Mistral Small 4, quantized to 4bit was comparable to Qwen 3.6 27B and is roughly the same size. At least from our experience on our use cases, the quantization of the Mistral model worked far better than trying to quantize the Qwen family. Fully agree to your point though, Mistral in general is far behind where I'd expect and Qwen in particular is crushing it at the smaller sizes. Personally, I'…

It's all relative. For local use I'd classify it by hardware (VRAM size) using FP8 or Q6 quantization:

1. tiny 2. small 4-8B -- runnable on 8GB GPUs

3. medium 9-12B -- runnable on 12GB GPUs

4. large 13-24B -- runnable on 16GB (for the lower end models) and 24GB GPUs

5. very large 25-32GB -- runnable on 32GB GPUs

6. huge >32GB -- not easily runnable on consumer GPUs without compromising performance (offloading layers to the CPU/RAM), quality (heavy quantization, esp. at You could possibly split huge down further, as 70GB models (e.g. llama 3) are easier to get working than >120GB models and 1TB models are completely intractable.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#65

Post by dyauspitr »

trouve_search wrote: post #9

OK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 are currently best in the small size; Mistral's "small" model has ~4x the parameter count at 120B and isn't even competing with models a quarter i…

Mistral is bad bad. For its use cases I feel like India’s Sarvam is doing better.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#66

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #3

> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers. Mistral leaning into on-prem and European-hosted models is very smart.

[deleted]

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#67

Post by MichaelZuo »

mattnewton wrote: post #48
ar0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO. I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is t…

My theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral…

Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support?

Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#68

Post by antirez »

b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #34
antirez wrote: post #27

I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, an…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act#Pe... Europe shot itself in the dick with this hastily implemented at the height of mass hysteria bullshit and now no sane company will build anything there. an AI startup in the US or China can be a boy and his computer. in Europe, the boy needs a dozen lawyers. Mistral's sinking into irrelevancy despite the head start they had, the very promising early model…

Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future, and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#69

Post by antirez »

GaProgMan wrote: post #61
antirez wrote: post #27

I really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, an…

Compared to the UK Government which recently announced 10 million GBP for AI research, which will likely be scooped up by consultants. I think Europe is doing fine considering.

The first step would be indeed to join forces with UK, in order to don't be two entities, which is very unnatural to me.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#70

Post by cm2012 »

gspr wrote: post #44
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act#Pe... Europe shot itself in the dick with this hastily implemented at the height of mass hysteria bullshit and now no sane company will build anything there. an AI startup in the US or China can be a boy and his computer. in Europe, the boy needs a dozen lawyers. Mistral's sinking into irrelevancy despite the head start they had, the very promising early model…

So you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?

That is almost a meaningless sentence. Cats and traffic lights both manipulate human behavior.
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