Live data from Hacker News

Mistral Saba

mistral.ai

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: Mistral Saba

#11
I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil are from a completely different family (Dravidian).

Why not either train the model exclusively on Semitic languages for further performance for those languages or on a wider set of languages for better multilingual performance overall? I don't understand the logic here.

Re: Mistral Saba

#12

I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil are fr…

There is a lot of Indian laborers in the Middle East, so it’s not that Tamil and Arabic are related, but a model used for that region should be fluent in both

Re: Mistral Saba

#13
Considering they don't talk about licensing, one can assume this is proprietary?

~2 years ago (Sep 27, 2023), Mistral AI said:

> we believe that an open approach to generative AI is necessary. Community-backed model development is the surest path to fight censorship and bias in a technology shaping our future. We strongly believe that by training our own models, releasing them openly, and fostering community contributions, we can build a credible alternative to the emerging AI oligopoly. Open-weight generative models will play a pivotal role in the upcoming AI revolution.

> Mistral AI’s mission is to spearhead the revolution of open models.

https://mistral.ai/en/news/about-mistral-ai

Did something change since then, or why did they have a change of hearts? Are they just doing a "OpenAI" and appear to believe in something in order to further their own cause, or does it have some particular reason behind it?

Re: Mistral Saba

#14
post #13

Considering they don't talk about licensing, one can assume this is proprietary? ~2 years ago (Sep 27, 2023), Mistral AI said: > we believe that an open approach to generative AI is necessary. Community-backed model development is the surest path to fight censorship and bias in a technology shaping our future. We strongly believe that by training our own models, releasing them openly, and fostering community contribu…

> One of the many custom-trained models to serve specific geographies, markets, and customers

> Mistral Saba is a result of working closely with strategic regional customers to address very specific challenges in addressing bespoke use cases.

It seems like a customer paid them to train this model, so presumably that customer gets to decide on licensing terms.

Isn’t this Mistral’s business model? Make general purpose models available as open-source and train more specific models for their customers?

Re: Mistral Saba

#15
post #13

Considering they don't talk about licensing, one can assume this is proprietary? ~2 years ago (Sep 27, 2023), Mistral AI said: > we believe that an open approach to generative AI is necessary. Community-backed model development is the surest path to fight censorship and bias in a technology shaping our future. We strongly believe that by training our own models, releasing them openly, and fostering community contribu…

> One of the many custom-trained models to serve specific geographies, markets, and customers > Mistral Saba is a result of working closely with strategic regional customers to address very specific challenges in addressing bespoke use cases. It seems like a customer paid them to train this model, so presumably that customer gets to decide on licensing terms. Isn’t this Mistral’s business model? Make general purpose…

It's available on their API service, so I'd assume it's not one of the private models others pay them to create, otherwise it would be fully private to the customer. Or, the customer wants it to be released/open, then the customer would release it, not Mistral. But I might misunderstand how they operate, happy to correct what I understand.

Edit: Actually, it is outlined in the bottom of the post:

> we have also begun to train models for strategic customers with the power of their deep and proprietary enterprise context. These models stay exclusive and private to the respective customers. If you would like to explore custom training with Mistral AI, explore our applied AI offerings, or please contact us.

So this is not one of those, as then it would be exclusive and private to the customer. This (Saba) is one of the models that I understood they would have released as at least "open-weights", if following their initial goals according to the early blog posts.

Re: Mistral Saba

#17

I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil are fr…

> I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together

Geography

Re: Mistral Saba

#18

GPT-4o mini keeps quietly demonstrating value per cost.

care to elaborate ?

Saba: input $0.2/M tokens / Output $0.6 /M tokens

GPT-4o Input: $0.15/M tokens Cached input:$0.075/M tokens Output:$0.6/1M tokens

sources: https://openai.com/api/pricing/ and https://mistral.ai/en/products/la-plateforme#pricing

Re: Mistral Saba

#19

I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil are fr…

There are a far greater number of speakers of Arabic in Germany (1.4M) [1] than in Afghanistan (420K) [2].

So properly speaking, they should be advertising the target region as Europe, Middle East and Africa. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Germany [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Afghanistan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

Re: Mistral Saba

#20

I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil are fr…

There is a lot of Indian laborers in the Middle East, so it’s not that Tamil and Arabic are related, but a model used for that region should be fluent in both

Not sure if you've been to the middle east, but there's no way the labourers will have access to the internet besides their phones. And those phones can only be used to communicate with their loved ones back home, using Whatsapp.

They don't (or rather CAN) care about anything else in the world.

They have a lot more problems than "this model doesn't convert urdu to arabic well".

Post reply on HN