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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

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Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#121

Post by cowpig »

mattnewton wrote: post #74
MichaelZuo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support? Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.

I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)

I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#122

Post by oblio »

neonstatic wrote: post #75
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.

It may be very smart for them, but it also shows that the EU has no desire, therefore no chance, to change and lead anything. The only thing it has is regulation.

The EU has just poured unfathomable amounts of money into continent wide infrastructure (https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resili...) - due to COVID, the military - due to Russia, etc. They can't do everything.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#123

Post by Shitty-kitty »

pembrook wrote: post #101
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…

> 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:…

You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people.

Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#124

Post by taneq »

losvedir wrote: post #100
gregorygoc wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they distill

I feel like there's an implication here that distillation is a problem but I don't understand what you mean. I thought distillation was generating text from a model and then training another model on it. Is the something unethical in that? You're paying the API costs to generate the tokens, right? Or I guess more to the point: is this something frontier labs have said is (or tried to paint at any rate) problematic? T…

Whether it's a 'problem' or not is viewpoint-dependent but it's against the OpenAI ToU:

> You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not:

> [...]

> * Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.

Source: https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/

(I'm also curious whether they consider developing a competing model to be illegal, or harmful, or abusive...?)

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#125

Post by whiplash451 »

Oras wrote: post #63

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?

Maybe because distilling small models from bigger ones that you control gives you better small models than fine-tuning from bigger models you don't control?

(I am not claiming it is the case, but stating this as an assumption)

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#126

Post by thatsadude »

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…

Nawh, they trained on test since Llama 2, no wonder.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#127

Post by bermudi »

djvdq wrote: post #38
baq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.

Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek

Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligence

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#128

Post by rolymath »

cowpig wrote: post #121
mattnewton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)

I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.

So, more than 70% of the compute on earth?

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#129

Post by eisa01 »

KronisLV wrote: post #90
djvdq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek

I tried it out on some dev tasks with their Mistral Vibe subscription, and the performance was pretty okay (okay, not great), both in regards to development and speed. Worse than Anthropic's models I'm used to but at 20 EUR per month it wasn't a bad deal - except that the 200k context size would more or less be a deal breaker in many cases.

Where do you sign up for that subscription?

I wanted to try out Mistral, but I fail to find anything like that even after creating an account

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#130

Post by CalRobert »

dash2 wrote: post #117
pembrook wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It varies a lot. Germany is pretty strong in English, and the Netherlands next door is exceptional, but as you go south to Italy, etc English proficiency weakens.

Edit: more broadly, there’s just more friction when people aren’t in their first language. I know I hesitate to bring up some things, say hi to strangers, try making a joke, etc because the cost of talking is just… higher.

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