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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

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Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#81

Post by ElFitz »

sroussey wrote: post #72
rhdunn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all relative. For local use I'd classify it by hardware (VRAM size) using FP8 or Q6 quantization: 1. tiny 2. small 4-8B -- runnable on 8GB GPUs 3. medium 9-12B -- runnable on 12GB GPUs 4. large 13-24B -- runnable on 16GB (for the lower end models) and 24GB GPUs 5. very large 25-32GB -- runnable on 32GB GPUs 6. huge >32GB -- not easily runnable on consumer GPUs without compromising performance (offloading layers…

As a Mac user: 1. tiny 2. small 4-8B -- last of browser options, MacBook Air base 3. medium 9-24B -- 32GB machine, air or pro notebook or mini 4. large 25-48B -- 64GB, pro notebook or mini 5. x-large 49-100B -- 128GB MacBook Pro or Studio 6. Huge > 100B -- 256/512GB Mac Studio

> tiny Or a phone. I’m running Gemma 4 E2B in one of my apps on my 14 pro (which may or may not be killing my display through overheating. It might just be a coincidence).

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#82

Post by ElFitz »

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.

Isn’t that the usual EU startup playbook once they give up on the B2C or world-scale SaaS markets? Refocusing on large (European) enterprise B2B and government contracts?

It always felt to me this (enterprise B2B) was where European startups went to die.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#83

Post by antirez »

neonstatic wrote: post #76
antirez wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly yes but let me remember you that France, Italy Germany were against the AI act, so here something very odd is happening, that the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed on key topics for our future , and I believe corruption could be a big part of what is happening, both internal to those three countries and at an even more alarming rate in other countries.

> the EU funding nations are getting marginalized by the countries they welcomed Thank you for reminding us that all animals are equal, but some are more equal

It's not a matter of importance, but that bad actors as they tried to do in Italy, corrupting EU parliament, may be doing the same with counties are have less visibility. A weak EU is not also in the best interest of countries that wanted the AI act, and surely not in the interest of their citizens, but there could be pressures.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#84

Post by sisve »

joe_mamba wrote: post #35
simonw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. I agree. That's why I think European companies might prefer a European model.

Except there's no such thing as the "European model" similar how Europe is not a country. Mistral is mostly French and tends to have mostly French speaking customers, like BNP PAribas in Belgium. Germany will want its own domestic AI champions, maybe in partnership with Switzerland and Austria, similar to how Denmark already has invested in LLMs focused on the Nordic languages with money from Norway. The biggest mist…

>Similar to how Denmark already has invested in LLMs focused on the Nordic languages with money from Norway.

Would love to know more. Do you have a source on this?

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#85

Post by ctrlkctrls »

gregorygoc wrote: post #58
amunozo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.

Because they distill

it doesn't matter the reason. This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.

Mistral looks like it's fading away to irrelevance unless they can play alongside the similar sized models, or have some unique advantage other than being in Europe, for Europe. I was really excited for them back when they were startup that had the biggest European venture round ever. This space will have a few winners, and many losers. Google, plus either Anthropic or OpenAI most likely. Big models will see breakthroughs in inference performance/cost fall precipitously and small models will only exist on devices (Pixels and iPhones, cars, watches, bluetooth speakers, etc)

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#86

Post by ctrlkctrls »

dyauspitr wrote: post #65
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 bad bad. For its use cases I feel like India’s Sarvam is doing better.

channeling Rocky (extraterrestrial) there I see :)

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#87

Post by tormeh »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #67
mattnewton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral…

Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support? Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.

It's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#89

Post by MichaelZuo »

baq wrote: post #73
MichaelZuo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support? Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.

They can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.

[flagged]

Re: Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

#90

Post by KronisLV »

djvdq wrote: post #38
baq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.

Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek

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.
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