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Mistral Agents API

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral Agents API

#11

Post by greenavocado »

htrp wrote: post #5

is mistral a model company, an agent company, or a enterprise software company now?

Mistral is trying to be everything at once and it shows. To make ends meet they pivoted to selling enterprise software through Le Chat and cozying up to Microsoft. Now they're throwing around terms like "agentic AI" to stay trendy, even as competitors like DeepSeek outperform them in key areas. Their identity crisis is obvious. Are they a model company? A software vendor? A research lab? At this point, they seem more like a startup chasing hype and funding than a company with a clear direction. The 6 billion Euro valuation looks impressive, but with so many shifts in strategy, you have to wonder if they're building something lasting or just riding the AI wave until it crashes.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#12

Post by potatolicious »

bbor wrote: post #4

Ok I’m behind the times in terms of MCP implementation, so would appreciate a check: the appeal of this feature is that you can pass off the “when to call which MCP endpoint and with what” logic to Mistral, rather than implementing it yourself? If so I’m not sure I completely understand why I’d want a model-specific, remote solution for this rather than a single local library, since theoretically this logic should be…

It seems like the main pitch here is auto-inclusion and auto-exclusion of various tools via an orchestration agent (which may or may not be the main model itself? Unclear from their post)

Mostly this seems like an end-run around tool calling scalability limits. Model performance degrades heavily if the field of possible tools gets too large, so you insert a component into the system that figures out what tools should be in-scope, and make only those available, to get reliability higher.

In terms of "why outsource this" it seems like the idea is that their orchestration agent would be better than a cruder task state machine that you would implement yourself. Time will tell if this assertion is true!

Re: Mistral Agents API

#13

Post by spmurrayzzz »

FailMore wrote: post #10

Is this basically a LLM that has tools automatically configured so I don’t have to handle that myself? Or am I not understanding it correctly? As in do I just make standard requests , but the LLM does more work than normal before sending me a response? Or I get the response to every step?

The aspirational goal is that the model knows what tools to call and when, without human intervention. In practice, you'll see varying efficacy with that depending on the tools you need. Some of the tool usage is in-distribution / well represented in training set, but if you have some custom exotic MCP server you created yourself (or pulled off of some random github) you may see mixed results. Sometimes that can be fixed by simply augmenting your prompt with contrastive examples of how to use or not use the tool.

As an aside, my experience with devstral (both via API and locally w/ open weights) has been very underwhelming to this effect. So I'm curious how this new agent infra performs given that observation.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#15

Post by koakuma-chan »

FailMore wrote: post #10

Is this basically a LLM that has tools automatically configured so I don’t have to handle that myself? Or am I not understanding it correctly? As in do I just make standard requests , but the LLM does more work than normal before sending me a response? Or I get the response to every step?

It's a software framework for orchestrating agents. Each agent can have its own system prompt, its own tools, and it can delegate ("hand off") to a different agent. When a hand off occurs, the LLM runs again but as a different agent.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#16

Post by brandall10 »

htrp wrote: post #5

is mistral a model company, an agent company, or a enterprise software company now?

Couldn't the same questions be asked of OpenAI and Anthropic?

Ultimately these are product/service companies, levering their research and innovations as differentiators.

If you're "only a model" company you likely have no moat.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#17

Post by manmal »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #15
FailMore wrote: post #10

Is this basically a LLM that has tools automatically configured so I don’t have to handle that myself? Or am I not understanding it correctly? As in do I just make standard requests , but the LLM does more work than normal before sending me a response? Or I get the response to every step?

It's a software framework for orchestrating agents. Each agent can have its own system prompt, its own tools, and it can delegate ("hand off") to a different agent. When a hand off occurs, the LLM runs again but as a different agent.

Like Gemini Gems, but agentic?

Re: Mistral Agents API

#18

Post by koakuma-chan »

manmal wrote: post #17
koakuma-chan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a software framework for orchestrating agents. Each agent can have its own system prompt, its own tools, and it can delegate ("hand off") to a different agent. When a hand off occurs, the LLM runs again but as a different agent.

Like Gemini Gems, but agentic?

Gemini Gems seems to be a ChatGPT “GPTs” equivalent, and I never figured out what those actually are. Mistral Agents API is like OpenAI Agents SDK.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#19

Post by qwertox »

The "My MCPs" button looks very promising.

I was looking around at Le Chat, a thing I haven't done in months, and I thought that they've really worked on interesting stuff in interesting ways.

The ability to enrich either a chat or generally an agent with one or more libraries has been solved in a very friendly way. I don't think OpenAI nor Anthropic have solved it so well.

Re: Mistral Agents API

#20

Post by LeoPanthera »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
manmal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Gemini Gems, but agentic?

Gemini Gems seems to be a ChatGPT “GPTs” equivalent, and I never figured out what those actually are. Mistral Agents API is like OpenAI Agents SDK.

Gems and GPTs are just a way to customize the system prompt from the web UI.
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