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Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

mistral.ai

351–360 of 444 posts

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#351

Etymological fun: both "mistral" and "magistral" mean "masterly." Mistral comes from Occitan for masterly, although today as far as I know it's only used in English when talking about mediterranean winds. Magistral is just the adjective form of "magister," so "like a master." If you want to make a few bucks, maybe look up some more obscure synonyms for masterly and pick up the domain names.

> as far as I know it's only used in English when talking about mediterranean winds.

It's a French company, and "mistral" has this usage in French as well. Also, "magistral" is just the french translation of "masterful".

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#352

We just tested magistral-medium as a replacement for o4-mini in a user-facing feature that relies on JSON generation, where speed is critical. Depending on the complexity of the JSON, o4-mini runs ranged from 50 to 70 seconds. In our initial tests, Mistral returned results in 34–37 seconds. The output quality was slightly lower but still remain acceptable for us. We’ll continue testing, but the early results are prom…

I bet you can close the gap with a finetune.

Should be quiet easy if you have some o4-mini results sitting around.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#353
post #339

One immediate observation I have about this model is that it seems to do a better job of filtering out or toning down some ideological disinformation that other models regurgitate from activist controlled Wikipedia articles, at least for a few I've checked. Previously you had to write your own sanity-check prompts to get the model to do extra up-front work to validate the logical and historical accuracy of things bef…

What’s an example prompt and sanitized prompt you use to evaluate?

Not going to leak my tests, but here's how you can create your own.

- Think up a topic that's interesting to you, yet maybe controversial.

- Look up primary sources and empirical information about it.

- Then look at a relevant Wikipedia article about it to see if the way the Wikipedia article frames it is honestly and faithfully justified by the primary sources and empirical data about it.

If the article seems to have a strong bias or critically misrepresent the reality even if it does so by stating true things, you have a juicy nugget on your hands.

Ask any given LLM about that topic and see if it regurgitates the opinion in the Wikipedia article. If it does, then develop your own prompt that requires the LLM to go down a checklist of things that help resolve warped logic without specifically trying to shape the output to your own preference. Now find other articles and see how well your checklist generalizes.

How well this works depends on how good the model you're using is at instruction following.

A lot of what thinking models do is expand the context around a topic to hopefully improve final prediction. To assist that, you have to encourage the LLM to be hesitant to form an opinion or decide on the conclusion before the end, otherwise it can start with a conclusion and spend the rest of the time supporting a weak conclusion rather than arriving at a stronger one after new information emerges.

The danger is that reasoning models will state early on in their reasoning some ideological fact the same way it might say, "well i know that 1+1=2, so that means X", when in reality a particular fact does not stand up to scrutiny. Then it gets lost in a loop thinking ideologically, which can help propagate these things through language models which is dangerous.

Ideally all ingested Wikipedia gets evaluated against some levels of ground truth before getting trained on to start with, but then it's harder to keep up to date with it. Until then we have to help LLMs handle these cases better.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and with the technology plateau-ing, being 6-12 months late with less debt is just long term thinking. Also, Europe being in the race is a big deal for consumers.

>with the technology plateau-ing People were claiming that since year 2022. Where's the plateau?

If you can't see it you're blind.

LLMs haven't improved much. What's improved is the chat apps: switching between language model, vision, image and video generation and being able to search the internet is what has made them seem 100x more useful.

Run a single LLM without any tools... They're still pretty dumb.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#356

I made some GGUFs for those interested in running them at https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL or ./llama.cpp/llama-cli -hf unsloth/Magistral-Small-2506-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL --jinja --temp 0.7 --top-k -1 --top-p 0.95 -ngl 99 Please use --jinja for llama.cpp and use temperature = 0.7, top-p 0.95! Also best to increase Ollama's context length…

Nice! I'm running on CPU only, so it's interesting to compare - the Magistral-Small-2506_Q8_0.gguf runs at under 2 tokens/s on my 16 core, but your UD-IQ2_XXS gets about 5.5 tokens/s which is fast enough to be useful - but it does hallucinate a bit more and loop a little; but still actually pretty good for something so small.

Oh nice! I normally suggest maybe Q4_K_XL to be on the safe side :)

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#357
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their benchmarks are interesting. They are comparing to DeepSeek-V3's (non-reasoning) December and DeepSeek-R1's January releases. I feel that comparing to DeepSeek-R1-0528 would be more fair. For example, R1 scores 79.8 on AIME 2024, R1-0528 performs 91.4. R1 scores 70 on AIME 2025, R1-0528 scores 87.5. R1-0528 does similarly better for GPQA Diamond, LiveCodeBench, and Aider (about 10-15 points higher). https://hugg…

Would also be interesting to compare with R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (chain-of-thought distilled from Deepseek-R1-0528 and post-trained into Qwen3-8B). It scores 86 and 76 on AIME 2024 and 2025 respectively. Currently running the 6-bit XL quant on a single old RTX 2080 Ti and I'm quite impressed TBH. Simply wild for a sub-8GB download.

I'm surprised it does very well as well - that's pretty cool to see!

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how amazing the first R1 model was and how little compute they needed to create it, I'm really wondering how the new R1 model isn't beating o3 and 2.5 Pro on every single benchmark. Magistral Small is only 24B and scores 70.7% on AIME2024 while the 32B distill of R1 scores 72.6%. And with majority voting @64 the Magistral Small manages 83.3%, which is better than the full R1. Since I can run a 24B model on a reg…

It's not better than full R1; Mistral is using misleading benchmarks. The latest version of R1, R1-0528, is much better: 91.4% on AIME2024 pass@1. Mistral uses the original R1 release from January in their comparisons, presumably because it makes their numbers look more competitive. That being said, it's still very impressive for a 24B. I'm really wondering how the new R1 model isn't beating o3 and 2.5 Pro on every s…

It may not have been intentionally misleading. Some benchmarks can take a lot of horsepower and time to run. Their preparation for release likely was done well in advance of the model release before the new deepseek r1 model had even been available to test.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#359
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that 20% of employees in the private sector are "cadres" and half of them are on "forfait jours". That makes around 10% of the private sector employees working 218 days per year without the 48/44 weekly hour limits. It's more than I thought but I doubt that many of them work more than 10 hours per day. Whether that's "exceptional" or not is a matter of definition, of course.

What do you mean with work more than 10h/day for intellectual work? You don't stop to think the moment you are away from the production machine. And the exact opposite can often happen: you go away from the computer/board/paper/office, make a walk trying to wander at something else as far as you can stear consciousness, and then the solutions/ideas land in your mind.

You’re not wrong but what did the commenter above meant with “50 hours+/week”? Weeks have three times as many hours. Years also have many more than 218 days.

Anyway I found an official survey saying that 40% of them work more than 50 hours per week (but fewer weeks than regular employees) so I guess it’s not so rare (around one private sector employee in twenty).

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody should be ever using ollama, for any reason. It literally only makes everything worse and more convoluted with zero benefits.

Could you elaborate?

Not the parent but I would say bad defaults or naming. There are countless posts from newbies wondering why a model doesn’t work as well as it should.

It’s usually either because the context size is set very low by default or they didn’t realize that they weren’t running the full model (ollama uses the distilled version in place of the full version but names it after the full version).

There’s also been some controversy over not giving proper credit to llama.cpp which ollama is/was a wrapper around.

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