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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

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Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#161

Post by phillc73 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #154
phillc73 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistral just acquired Emmi AI, an Austrian startup. German and French speaking together at last. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197995

Was EMI specialized in the German language LLMs? Or is it that they're an Austrian lab?

Emmi is an Austrian lab specialising in physics AI applications.

Mistral isn’t specialising in French language LLMs either.

The point was that across different European countries and languages there are collaborations and M&A happening.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#162

Post by zhivota »

taneq wrote: post #124
losvedir wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Feels like this should be some kind of anti-competitive violation even if it's not actually. Probably moot under this admin but still.

It's like saying you can't use windows to develop an OS, or drive a Ford on the way to your job at Hyundai.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#163

Post by KronisLV »

eisa01 wrote: post #129
KronisLV wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The other comment already mentioned that you get their subscription: https://mistral.ai/pricing/ they do say that you can try out their coding agent for free, but personally the Pro tier is pretty affordable too to try out for a month.

Then you can install their coding harness, I personally used the Python + uv option: https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ if you don't have uv yet, you might have to install it too: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ though I already use it for other projects. Oh and if on Windows, you probably want to do all of the installation inside of WSL, just so that file paths are the *nix variety, I've had issues otherwise with pretty much every coding harness, like OpenCode as well (across multiple models).

After that, you need an API key for your subscription, you can generate and copy it here: https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli that's also where you see the quota, though it seems to NOT refresh instantly, but more or less a few times a day.

Either way, happy coding!

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#164

Post by kergonath »

antirez wrote: post #69
GaProgMan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That Brexit ship sailed. It’s very difficult to do anything with the UK currently.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#165

Post by kergonath »

sbinnee wrote: post #112
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.

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.

From what I understood they are retiring a lot of the specialised models in favour of the main family.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#166

Post by arkh »

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 entering the "let's extract has much money from EU taxpayers as we can" phase of European tech company which did not get bought by a US one.

They'll end like Dailymotion, just a zombie company.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#167

Post by Matl »

taneq wrote: post #124
losvedir wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> it's against the OpenAI ToU

Given that OpenAI doesn't care about training on copyrighted data, why is suddenly their ToU something anyone should care about?

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#168

Post by tomaskafka »

I have been on a lecture from great government IT person, they are evaluating models and are very unhappy about the situation, because they’d love to use Mistral, in some cases it’s the only EU based model they can use … and they know it’s really bad and falling more behind.

It is well possible that Mistral can make a profitable business by being bad, but still the only possible model for EU uses. Sad story, sad to witness.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#169

Post by Matl »

Saline9515 wrote: post #149
gregorygoc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question, given that American companies basically threw copyright law into the trash, I think they should.

American companies can't sur Chinese ones, but they can do it with European ones.

So then the European ones should join with European copyright holders to sue OpenAI/Anthropic and watch them trying to BS their way around what they train on.
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