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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

koenvangilst.nl

111–120 of 230 posts

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#111
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.

[flagged]

Or maybe they’re just poor.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#112
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.

My take is that Mistral is not focusing on generating contents such as code, images, or videos. They focus on multi-lingual models, OCR, voice, and others I believe. Their model intro page manifests that although it always confuses me because it's too colorful and there are too many categories, not to mention model names. I hope their decisions will pay off.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#113

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…

I find Mistral Medium 3.5 with OpenCode is perfectly fine if you're willing to talk to it in a more fine-grained way about actual code. For me that's fine because even with huge frontier models I don't like trying to vibe prompt like a product manager.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#114
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they're intentionally being bad because they can't manage to pump $65B into a startup on a whim...?

[flagged]

What claims are you talking about?

I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#115
Does anyone else always read "Mistrial" instead of "Mistral"? Always think I'm about to read a juicy gossip piece, and let down when it's just a standard update on an AI company.

edit A lot of AI company names are really strange, actually. "Claude" is really the best a trillion+ dollar company could come up with? It sounds like the name of a grandpa or something.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#116
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…

Way more important than this act are the police raids. Someone used your SaaS to send phishing (see today's front page HN)? They'll just take all your servers away. Goodbye business. Unless they think the general public would riot, so established companies are okay. You can't build a castle on a foundation of quicksand.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#117
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…

> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-... Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:…

>The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).

Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What claims are you talking about? I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.

[flagged]

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What claims are you talking about? I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.

[flagged]

No, we want you to backup your claims and provide sources or stop adding pointless low effort anti-EU noise to the conversation. It's frustrating, any time there's any kind of discussion about anything European on HN it gets flooded with shallow, low effort "EU-bad" posts like your contributions here.

If you're going to make that claim at least put some effort in.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#120
post #40

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…

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…

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