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Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

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Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#361
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know of will try to click "reject all unnecessary cookies", and you don't need the dialog for the necessary ones. You can therefore simply remove the dialog and the tracking, simplifying your code and improving your users' experience. Can tracking the fraction which misclicks even give some useful data?

My point was that according to the current interpretation, if they rely on cookies, user analytics (even simple visitor stats where no personal data is actually processed) are not considered "necessary" and are therefore not exempt from the cookie consent obligation under the ePrivacy Directive. The reason why personal data processing is irrelevant is that the cookie consent requirement itself is based on the pre-GDP…

User analytics that require cookies, sounds like tracking to me.

> like session cookies for managing signed-in state etc.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but are you saying that consent is required for session cookies? Because that is not the case, at all.

> (25) However, such devices, for instance so-called "cookies", can be a legitimate and useful tool, for example, in analysing the effectiveness of website design and advertising, and in verifying the identity of users engaged in on-line transactions. Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment. This is particularly important where users other than the original user have access to the terminal equipment and thereby to any data containing privacy-sensitive information stored on such equipment. Information and the right to refuse may be offered once for the use of various devices to be installed on the user's terminal equipment during the same connection and also covering any further use that may be made of those devices during subsequent connections. The methods for giving information, offering a right to refuse or requesting consent should be made as user-friendly as possible. Access to specific website content may still be made conditional on the well-informed acceptance of a cookie or similar device, if it is used for a legitimate purpose.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2002/58/oj/eng

You should inform users about any private data you would be storing in a cookie. But this can be a small infobox on your page with no button.

When storing other type of information, the "cookie" problem needs to be seen from the perspective of shared devices. You know, the times before, when you might forget to log out at an internet cafe or clear your cookies containing password and other things they shouldn't. This is a dated approach at looking at the problem (most people have their own computing devices today, their phone), but still applicable (classrooms, and family shared devices).

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, actually?

Because we do not have a complete understanding of human neurons. How are we supposed to accurately model something we cannot directly observe?

Just because you don't know how does not mean that we can't.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#363
post #19

The featured accuracy benchmarks exclude every model that matter except DeepSeek, which is quite telling about this new model's performance. This makes it yet another example of European companies building great products but fumbling marketing. Mistral's edge is speed. It's a real pleasure to use because it answers in ~1s what takes other models 5-8s, which makes for a much better experience. But instead of focusing…

I tried thinking with websearch on their website.

It has similar speed with o4-mini with search on chatgpt, and o4-mini gave me much better result.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not do any thinking. It is a statistical model, just like the rest of them.

"Thinking" is a term of art referring to the hidden/internal output of "reasoning" models where they output "chain of thought" before giving an answer[1]. This technique and name stem from the early observation that LLMs do better when explicitly told to "think step by step"[2]. Hope that helps clarify things for you for future constructive discussion. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.10630v1 [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf…

It's a misleading "term of art" which is more accurately described as a "term of marketing". Reasoning is precisely what LLMs don't do and it's precisely why they are unsuited to many tasks they are peddled for.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#365

I don't understand why the benchmark selections are so scattered and limited. It only compares Magistral Medium with Deepseek V3, R1, and the other close weighted Mistral Medium 3. Why did they leave off Magistral Small entirely, alongside comparisons with Alibaba Qwen or the mini versions of o3 and o4?

When they include comparisons, it is always a deliberate decision what to show and, more importantly, what not to show. If they had data that would show better performance compared to those models, there is no reason for them to not emphasize that.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#366
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have access to records from the before times when the internet was wide open and Facebook, Google and Microsoft were big in China. Well, Microsoft is still big because they're not an internet company and unfazed by censorship, but the exit of Google and Facebook took a lot of pressure off Baidu and the entire Chinese social media ecosystem.

Facebook and Google were never big in China, not even close.

Google had 31% market share in 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8455712.stm I haven't been able to find numbers for Facebook.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we do not have a complete understanding of human neurons. How are we supposed to accurately model something we cannot directly observe?

Do you also complain when someone says "Half-life 2 has great water-physics" with "Don't call it physics, we still don't understand all the physical laws of the universe, and also they use limited-precision floating-point, so it's not water-physics, it's just a bunch of math"? Like, we've agreed that "water-physics" and "cloth physics" in 3d graphics refers to a mathematical approximation of something we don't actual…

> Do you also complain when someone says "Half-life 2 has great water-physics"

I would if they said the water in Half-life 2 was great for quenching your thirst or that in the near future everyone will only drink water from Half-life 2 and it will flow from our kitchen taps when it's clear that however good Half-life 2 is at approximating what water looks and acts like it isn't capable of being a beverage and isn't likely to ever become one. Right now there are a lot of people going around saying that what passes for AI these days has the ability to reason and that AGI is right around the corner but that's just as obvious a lie and every bit as unlikely, but the more it gets repeated the more people end up falling for it.

It's frustrating because at some point (if it hasn't happened already) you're going to find yourself feeling very thirsty and be shocked to discover that the only thing you have access to is Half-life 2 water, even though it does nothing for you except make you even more thirsty since it looks close enough to remind you of the real thing. All because some idiot either fell for the hype or saved enough money by not supplying you with real water that they don't care how thirsty that leaves you.

The more companies force the use of flawed and unreasoning AI to do things that require actual reasoning the worse your life is going to get. The constant misrepresentation of AI and what it's capable of is accelerating that outcome.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because DeepSeek was a fast copy. That was the easy part and it's why they didn't have to use so much compute to get near the top. Going well beyond o3 or 2.5 Pro is drastically more expensive than fast copy. China's cultural approach to building substantial things produces this sort of outcome regularly, you see the same approach in automobiles, planes, Internet services, industrial machinery, military, et al.…

This terrible and vague stereotyping about "China" while having no clue about the subject should have no place on HN but somehow always creeps in and is upvoted by someone. DeepSeek is not "China", they had nobody to copy from, they released their first 7B reasoning model back in April 2024, it was ahead of then-SotA models in math and validated their approach. They did a ton of new things besides training a reasonin…

I thought it had been bandied about that Deepseek had exfiltrated a bunch of data from OpenAI's models, which was then used to train theirs? Did this ultimately prove untrue? My apologies, I don't always keep up on the latest drama in the AI circles - so maybe that has been well proven wrong.

Re: Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jm2c but I feel conflicted about this arms race. You can be 6/12 months later, and have not burned tens of billions compared to the best in class, I see it an engineering win. I absolutely understand those that say "yeah, but customers will only use the best", I see it, but is market share of forever money losing businesses that valuable?

A similar sentiment existed for a long time about Uber and now they're very profitable and own their market. It was worth the burn to capture the market. Who says OpenAI can't roll over to profitable at a stable scale? Conquer the market, hike the price to $29.95 (family account, no ads; $19.95 individual account with ads; etc etc). To say nothing of how they can branch out in terms of being the interaction point tha…

I think the jury is still out on Uber. They first became profitable in 2023 after 15 years of massive losses. They still burned way more money than they ever made.
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