5/29/2026 at 5:38:18 PM
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 its size.
Back one year ago with Mistral Small 3.1 they were keeping up, but they've fallen into irrelevancy right now.
If Mistral seriously wants to play the on-prem and small task-specific model game, a decent proxy would be to build models that get the r/localLlama crowd excited
by trouve_search
5/29/2026 at 6:47:48 PM
I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO.I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks.
by ar0
5/29/2026 at 7:10:16 PM
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 just doesn’t have access to this level of compute or the money to try and muscle their way in.by mattnewton
5/29/2026 at 8:38:56 PM
Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support?Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.
by MichaelZuo
5/29/2026 at 9:16:13 PM
I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)by mattnewton
5/30/2026 at 3:13:49 AM
I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.by cowpig
5/30/2026 at 5:00:25 AM
So, more than 70% of the compute on earth?by rolymath
5/30/2026 at 11:02:23 AM
More than 5%, I assume. From the combination of "5% in the EU under European companies" and "each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU"I dont't think that was meant to be implied: the EU actually has access to more GPUs than those hosted by European companies in Europe, just as US labs have access to GPUs hosted outside the US
by wongarsu
5/29/2026 at 9:11:44 PM
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.
by baq
5/30/2026 at 7:35:54 AM
The chinese labs manage to do it. Mistral should have enough money.by Tepix
5/30/2026 at 11:10:43 AM
The EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanismsIt's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support
by wongarsu
5/30/2026 at 11:33:57 AM
China is a way more corrupt country but this might be a benefit of less rules.by snowpid
5/30/2026 at 9:39:24 PM
China has cheap coal powered electricity and leaders that make things happen. Europe has beaureaucrats that only love talking, high taxes and expensive energy.by codebolt
5/29/2026 at 9:56:48 PM
[flagged]by MichaelZuo
5/29/2026 at 10:08:40 PM
You think they're intentionally being bad because they can't manage to pump $65B into a startup on a whim...?by bbor
5/29/2026 at 11:41:09 PM
[flagged]by MichaelZuo
5/30/2026 at 12:31:54 AM
What claims are you talking about?I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.
by Bewelge
5/30/2026 at 1:46:01 AM
[flagged]by MichaelZuo
5/30/2026 at 1:59:57 AM
No, we want you to backup your claims and provide sources or stop adding pointless low effort anti-EU noise to the conversation. It's frustrating, any time there's any kind of discussion about anything European on HN it gets flooded with shallow, low effort "EU-bad" posts like your contributions here.If you're going to make that claim at least put some effort in.
by esperent
5/30/2026 at 9:18:35 AM
This is a mostly American forum and some people want to piss on the EU to elevate themselves. Europeans do the same to the US but about politics, health care, work life balance, and quality of life. You know, the stuff that matters :Dby akie
5/30/2026 at 11:29:05 AM
[flagged]by MichaelZuo
5/29/2026 at 11:43:06 PM
Or maybe they’re just poor.by jimbokun
5/29/2026 at 9:51:06 PM
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.by tormeh
5/29/2026 at 10:15:30 PM
And a lot of the "funding" is through mutual deals with MSFT, Nvidia, etc. The Europeans have none of that and would need to pay in actual cash.by teiferer
5/29/2026 at 10:12:39 PM
> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?Not ruthless enough and no backing by a corrupt govt administration that has no morals but focuses on self-enrichment instead.
Might sound drastic but I think that's actually closer to the truth thn everbody likes to admit.
> My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks.
Exactly.
by teiferer
5/30/2026 at 7:29:53 PM
My hope is that people working with less resources will need to push on ingenuity to do more with less, leading to innovations. But there’s certainly no guarantee of itby steve_adams_86
5/30/2026 at 12:04:42 PM
Should it, though?I think an European company, taking Chinese models, perhaps doing its own post-training on them and training the Chinese-ness out, with a great chat service, enterprise API and coding agent, could be pretty valuable in itself.
by miki123211
5/30/2026 at 5:13:36 PM
What does “training the Chinese-ness out” even mean?!by pyvpx
5/30/2026 at 6:21:52 PM
The Chinese censorship. The Chinese use open weight models, Europeans too. US big three don't.by Fnoord
5/29/2026 at 10:43:53 PM
> what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?All of the above and more. Everything holding Mistral back is the same thing that has held Europe back from competing in the entire digital revolution. See this 1991 article lamenting the loss of any viable European PC manufacturer: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-...
Mistral being in Europe is disadvantaged with:
1. Money: less diverse private pension fund environment = less LPs to invest in VC funds = less VC dollars to invest in new ventures. European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds. This starves the private sector of capital while inflating the % of GDP driven by government spending every year (government pension funds buying government bonds in circular fashion enable runaway deficit spending...just like circular AI infrastructure spending).
2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.
3. Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).
4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc.
It's not "culture" or Europeans being "lazy" as most people would claim. There's currently thousands of young french people working 80 hour weeks creating dumb consulting powerpoints or legacy investment banking deal memos as we speak. Ambitious people exist everywhere in equal proportion, they're just working on the wrong things.
Europe can't compete in the digital revolution the same way they could compete in the industrial revolution due to various system design choices. Culture is simply the aesthetically observed byproducts of system design.
by pembrook
5/30/2026 at 1:24:34 AM
>The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).Not true in my experience: even German waiters in small towns tend to have pretty fluent English.
by dash2
5/30/2026 at 5:13:38 AM
It varies a lot. Germany is pretty strong in English, and the Netherlands next door is exceptional, but as you go south to Italy, etc English proficiency weakens.Edit: more broadly, there’s just more friction when people aren’t in their first language. I know I hesitate to bring up some things, say hi to strangers, try making a joke, etc because the cost of talking is just… higher.
by CalRobert
5/30/2026 at 7:01:45 AM
Was just driving around medium and small-ish towns in Bavaria. This was not my experience at all.The German speaking members of our group had to order food for us in most restaurants.
And most locals aren’t waiters in restaurants.
by pembrook
5/30/2026 at 5:55:47 PM
> 4. Regulatory disadvantages: In everything from company regs, employee regs, unions, privacy regs, data portability regs, etc.Agreed. My own anecdote: my company is global and for the past 6 months, we've been working on getting regulatory and legal approval for an LLM-based feature. The initial proposals of going live in all of our markets have been pared back to exclude Europe altogether due to the regulatory environment.
When I took part in company-wide gen AI councils that reviewed new product rollouts, it seemed like there was a definite hesitation from higher ups from pushing out any leading edge features to European markets. And it's not that the regulations would necessarily block these features from going live but that they'd increase implementation costs to the point where it wouldn't be worth it.
by cj00
5/30/2026 at 8:16:44 AM
1 and 2 are the same. Infinite money without barely any consequence because of 'reserve currency' privilege. To compete with that, the EU can't nuke the dollar because it would be suicide given the Eurodollar realities, and they can't anchor EU ip and talent because our politicians are too intertwined with globalist ideology and capital.by PeterStuer
5/30/2026 at 11:35:42 AM
"they can't anchor EU ip and talent because our politicians are too intertwined with globalist ideology and capital." You want to force staying in the EU?by snowpid
5/31/2026 at 7:28:27 AM
You think other regions do not anchor strategic industries? The EU is extremely lax in this regard.by PeterStuer
5/31/2026 at 6:27:52 PM
so why do you use the term globalist? Most talent is globalist anyway.by snowpid
5/30/2026 at 6:21:31 AM
> 2. Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.There is definitely a lot of truth to that. Maybe a bit of an arbitrary measure, but these are the nationalites of the people that wrote the "Attention is all you need" paper. Pretty revealing I find:
Ashish Vaswani: India
Niki Parmar: India
Jakob Uszkoreit: Germany
Llion Jones: Wales (UK)
Aidan Gomez: Canada
Łukasz Kaiser: Poland
Illia Polosukhin: Ukraine
Noam Shazeer: USA
by _fizz_buzz_
5/30/2026 at 11:38:17 AM
Yes that was 2018. Things vastly deteriorated in the US.by snowpid
5/30/2026 at 3:42:03 AM
You say that as if the American version of maximalist Capitalism is good or desirable to most people.Personally, I would much rather have good public pensions and health-care, than A.I agents.
by Shitty-kitty
5/30/2026 at 3:14:50 PM
Maybe we will have only agents, soon.by manmal
5/30/2026 at 6:55:05 AM
This has nothing to do with it.The US also has public pensions (social security payouts rival or beat many EU countries) with dramatically better tax free private options on top.
Also, the US has free healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid) for roughly 50% of its population.
Expanding that to 100% doesn’t suddenly make them a bad country to do business in.
You think OpenAI is going to close up shop and move to Mexico if the US expands single payer healthcare? That would actually make it even easier for businesses to operate in the US!
by pembrook
5/30/2026 at 7:36:12 AM
Social Security and Medicare are vastly inferior to their European counterparts. Medicaid is an absolute disaster and a large number of doctors and health facilities will not even accept it.by Shitty-kitty
5/30/2026 at 7:44:28 AM
Not true in the case of average social security payouts. But again, this argument is a total derailing of this thread and addresses none of my points.Explain to me how expanding US single payer healthcare suddenly makes the US a worse place to do business in than Europe?
Companies would love not having to deal with the complexities of 401ks and employer health plans.
by pembrook
5/31/2026 at 2:40:20 PM
You must have misunderstood me. I never argued that US single payer healthcare would be bad, just that one based on expanding medicaid bottom-rung insurance, would not be adequate.by Shitty-kitty
5/30/2026 at 10:29:10 AM
Yeah and data protections. GDPR, data frugality laws, etc. may be the end of Mistral but it's a small price to pay for corporations to not have free range over every minute detail of our lives. Americans just accept it because they have already lost. We haven't, in fact we've just won recently with chat control being struck down. Meta can no longer train on and monitor every Whatsapp chat without being criminally liable.by moffkalast
5/30/2026 at 6:34:53 PM
> European money is vacuumed out of the private sector into state pension funds and dumped into low yielding government bonds.Which countries do that? The ones in NL actually invest in US big tech.
Once Europe stops investing in USA, Europe will be better able to compete.
> Talent & compute: due to #1, Silicon Valley can outbid Europe for the best talent and hardware. Watch an OpenAI launch video and listen to all the European accents.
That just denotes European students are high quality.
Brain drain is happening due to bullying and fascism. The extend of longterm danage of current administration is unclear.
> Local market fragmentation: Europe is a collection of countries that pretend to work together while not even having a unified capital market. The average EU citizen can barely communicate with their neighbor in a common language beyond the level of a toddler (english fluency is massively overstated by Americans who only experience tourist capitals).
Bollocks. I have been in Berlin and Munich various times past decades, and people there speak English very well. Nowadays, translation is a profession which got hit by the AI club.
The people in the rural areas don't have to work together with other people from rural areas. They just need websites and tooling in their native language, or a major language.
Case in point: the French company Mistral has Dutch company ASML has one of their major investors. If you go to Eindhoven area (Netherlands mini SV called Brainport Eindhoven), you get away with English perfectly fine, and there too you will hear all kind if accents.
by Fnoord
5/31/2026 at 1:23:32 PM
> Which countries do that?Every single one invests in government bonds with a large allocation. Aside from the pure ponzi scheme ones with no actual fund where its money in -> money out.
Also, if Europe stopped investing in US equities their pension insolvency problem would get about 2-3X worse given US equities have far exceeded EU equity returns over the past 20 years.
> Brain drain is happening due to bullying and fascism. The extend of longterm danage of current administration is unclear.
Huh? Did you even see the headline of the 1991 article I linked? Brain drain has been happening because of everything I listed which has been true for decades. Europe couldn't come up with a relevant company in PCs, Operating Systems, Internet 1.0, Social media, Mobile, AI, etc. None of it is due to the current administration.
> Bollocks. I have been in Berlin and Munich various times past decades, and people there speak English very well.
Yes, and while you were traveling to tourist capitals occasionally I've been actually living in Europe. Your perception is not the reality the average German person lives.
The problem isn't that the smartest Engineers in Europe don't speak english. The problem is that the average person in the markets they would sell into don't speak a common language.
Kind of hard to cut deals and build a brand among 27 different insular, hyper nationalist markets in a bunch of languages you don't speak with completely different regulations.
by pembrook
5/30/2026 at 2:05:09 PM
re: #4 Maybe it’s easier if you grow up in the system and know how to navigate the written and unwritten rules, but as a dual Canadian-American who recently gained Austrian citizenship, the regulatory friction is absolutely real. I decided to launch a new venture through an Austrian GmbH.There are supposedly streamlined paths for local residents, but I had to go through the standard corporate pipeline. I spent three months fighting a bizarre catch-22 between my notary (who cost €3k+) and the bank. To open the account, I had to prove I deposited €10k in capital. But I couldn't make the deposit without an active bank account. On top of that, the bank's compliance team kept arbitrarily canceling my application due to "incorrect answers"... refusing to tell me what the errors actually were and forcing me to restart the entire process ab initio.
I finally just gave up. I wrote off the €3,000 notary fee and €1,000 in registered office costs as a sunk cost, and incorporated a US LLC instead. It took under 10 minutes, no notary, fees of $25 since I did it myself, plus another 20 minutes to open the business bank account.
There was no commercial reason to choose Austria; it was purely sentimental. My ancestors were entrepreneurs in Linz and Vienna, and I loved the idea of renewing that legacy. But the sheer weight of the bureaucracy managed to kill about 99% of the early-stage startup enthusiasm you normally rely on to get a new project off the ground.
by WhyComboNadir
5/30/2026 at 4:17:05 PM
That catch-22 is supposed to be broken by the bank. It's a two phase commit where you open the account in a special state where you can only deposit the capital. Then the bank gives you evidence you've done so, you take that to the notary and open the company, then send the evidence you've done that back to the bank to convert it into a full account.It's a bizarre system that Switzerland uses too. I've done it twice. Unfortunately the German speaking world has a lot of rules that are trying to eliminate all risk for investors and employees. The GmbH/AG capital requirements are just the start.
The next fun thing you might have encountered, at least in Switzerland, are rules that literally say your company's assets can't fall below 50% of your initial capitalization. If it does you're supposed to raise funds or make more investment of your own private capital and this rule pierces the usual liability requirements. Even more fun: it turns out that this law isn't actually enforced and locals regularly ignore it. But bad accountants won't tell you that. They'll just inform you of the law when you do your yearly accounts.
Then you have wealth taxes that cover the valuation of a startup as if it were a cash position. So if you raise $100M in investor funding then whatever shares you have left over are considered to be liquid assets you can offload at will, and are wealth taxed as such. The fact that the shares don't trade in a liquid market is irrelevant to the tax authorities. In Zürich at least that got patched by the local tax office deciding that startup shares aren't counted for the wealth tax, but this just means you have to be able to convince the tax authority that your company is a startup. The way they determine this is more or less just the opinion of whoever at the tax office assesses your case. Does it sound "startuppy" enough?
Fixing this stuff isn't hard, but it never gets fixed because European politics is both quite stagnant and dominated by people who view hostility to business as a virtue signal. They don't want to fix it because they think businesses are sort of like oil fields. They just exist, lying around naturally, and the only question is how to maximally exploit them.
by mike_hearn
5/31/2026 at 2:27:52 PM
re: catch-22. I was surprised to learn of it, but then even more surprised to get caught up in an endless loop even when I followed the process.For European countries it seems like a left-hand-right-hand problem: I go to a party at the Los Angeles Austrian consulate, or a "Start Up Austria" event in SF and listen to them pitch bringing businesses to Austria (the left hand). But back home the "right hand" and culture seems to look down at people who have accumulated wealth, and be hostile to the idea of the most simple reforms that would actually make someone want to move their business to Austria/EU. For example, the intrenched interests of needing a notary paid a few thousand Euros, are screwing the whole country so one set of people can fill an archaic role.
Do you know how much a notary costs in the US? If you go to a UPS or FedEx store, it is typically about $10-15. If you go to your own bank they do it for free.
And get this, when you incorporate a company in a US state, guess how many things need to be notarized? None. As you fill out the forms you are swearing to their truth, and accepting a notice that you are committing perjury if you are untruthful. Do they check your statements right then to make sure you're not lying - absolutely not! Why bother, you haven't started anything yet. But by God, if 5 years later when you're making money, the IRS finds out that you lied, then you're going to wish you were living in another country.
In other words, the timeframe for the risk concern is completely backwards in Europe: the risk management basically stops 95% of things from happening in the first place, including the 0.001% the might be fraudulent. Wouldn't it be better to let 1,000,000+ companies get formed, then 50,000 of them naturally become a meaningful success, then take a closer look at their compliance once they are truly a real business.
I had some ignorant biases against doing business in Europe before starting this process - and I was hoping that experience would change my mind - but the funny thing is that my biases weren't strong enough! (my bank and incorporating story above is just one example of many). No thank you EU!
(My first businesses were started in Canada, and I thought Canada was so backwards compared to the US in being business friendly, but now I realize Canada is maybe 90% as business friendly as the USA. EU, in my experience is like 5% as business friendly as USA)
by WhyComboNadir
5/30/2026 at 7:44:08 AM
> I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data?Considering all their talk about new DCs and compute, and a few offhand comments, it sounded to me that compute is a big limitation.
by sofixa
5/30/2026 at 2:44:52 AM
[dead]by selectively
5/29/2026 at 6:37:25 PM
> task focused small modelsThis is tangential: and forgive my ignorance here, but is there an inherent reason why there aren't smaller, focused models from the frontier model providers?
I'm thinking something like a software-specific subset of Opus that is the default for use in Claude Code. Smaller, cheaper to deploy and consume, maybe faster.
by greyskull
5/29/2026 at 6:54:44 PM
OpenAI used to make Codex-specific models, but they stopped. What I've gathered from interviews and similar is that training two models isn't worth the (small) lift from having a coding-specific model. You're pre-training on everything anyway, and coding RL is reasonably useful for general-purpose models too.by pavpanchekha
5/29/2026 at 7:13:15 PM
Interesting. I'd have guessed there would be meaningful opex benefits to serving smaller models.by greyskull
5/29/2026 at 11:05:08 PM
What I've heard is that much of the model "intelligence" is a commingled bucket: although you can specialize specific knowledge somewhat, it's hard to specialize advanced reasoning to specific domains because so much of reasoning is a generalized capability that is not unique to, say, coding.It turns out coding has to do with a lot of the same reasoning needed in math or in legal analysis, even if the grammatical expression is different.
This is less true of lower intelligence tasks. Classification requires a lot less reasoning capacity and so can be much smaller and more specialized.
by mediaman
5/29/2026 at 6:27:01 PM
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.by baq
5/29/2026 at 7:23:32 PM
DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.by amunozo
5/30/2026 at 6:17:07 PM
Not in many tasks. I use deepseek as a fallback in https://phrasing.app and it’s always very apparent when it happen (due to mistakes/clear performance drop off)by barrell
5/30/2026 at 6:50:53 PM
Interesting - which models specifically? I'd be interested in using mistral over deepseek if it was competitive (guess I need to go benchmark)by efromvt
5/30/2026 at 7:44:08 PM
I use small, large, an medium-3.5 depending on the taskby barrell
5/29/2026 at 7:41:55 PM
Because they distillby gregorygoc
5/29/2026 at 10:37:30 PM
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? This feels like an "out of the loop" situation because I've only ever heard "distillation" with a positive connotation before.
by losvedir
5/30/2026 at 4:20:03 AM
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...?)
by taneq
5/30/2026 at 10:07:00 AM
> it's against the OpenAI ToUGiven that OpenAI doesn't care about training on copyrighted data, why is suddenly their ToU something anyone should care about?
by Matl
5/30/2026 at 1:10:00 PM
That OpenAI was in the wrong when they ignored everyone copyright, does not make it right to ignore their ToU. If a one wants IP and rule of law (incl contracts) to be respected, one should not violate others rights when it is convenient.On a more risk-strategy level there is the size of their legal team, general endowment, and supplier and political connections to consider.
Everyone is free to ignore their ToU, but I can understand why a company would avoid it...
by jononor
5/30/2026 at 1:21:43 PM
> If a one wants IP and rule of law (incl contracts) to be respected, one should not violate others rights when it is convenient.Yes that's what should be said to OpenAI. Now they should not cry about their T&Cs not being respected when they never cared about others' copyrights.
by nibbleyou
5/30/2026 at 9:49:29 AM
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.
by zhivota
5/30/2026 at 9:00:10 PM
In heavily-unionized areas, you'd best not drive that Hyundai to your job at the Ford plant.by CamperBob2
5/29/2026 at 9:49:33 PM
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)
by ctrlkctrls
5/29/2026 at 10:15:19 PM
It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I am just pointing out why it’s hard to catch up to scaling laws given the European economic (capital) and political (US would be upset if they found out Europeans distill) constraints. China is only bound by economic constraints.by gregorygoc
5/30/2026 at 9:18:51 AM
With the insight in your comment and this bit from the above one:> This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.
It seems like the EU should have paid China for the distillation datasets, esp. since Mistral isn’t even a governmental org.
by KronisLV
5/30/2026 at 7:51:41 AM
> This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably.
For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that.
And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.
by sofixa
5/29/2026 at 9:54:40 PM
Why doesn't Mistral distill?by k__
5/29/2026 at 10:11:59 PM
Good question, given that American companies basically threw copyright law into the trash, I think they should.by gregorygoc
5/30/2026 at 7:51:29 AM
American companies can't sur Chinese ones, but they can do it with European ones.by Saline9515
5/30/2026 at 10:09:03 AM
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.by Matl
5/31/2026 at 5:09:40 PM
Training a model on copyrighted material is fair use and copyright holders already operate a mafia-style extortion ring in Europe, so I don't think that's a good idea.by Saline9515
5/31/2026 at 4:55:08 AM
American companies won't even sue other American companies (xai distilling opus), in fact they instead form partnerships ;)by cleaning
5/29/2026 at 11:05:13 PM
Well if they did wouldn't be able to feel superior to Americans about that particular thing. Perish the thought!by xienze
5/30/2026 at 8:15:10 AM
It’s really a pity, why can’t they feel superior while breaking ToS and copyrights just like Americans can feel superior over Deepseek while breaking ToS and copyrights?by __m
5/29/2026 at 10:23:29 PM
I suppose losing with dignity is a consolation.by opsnooperfax
5/29/2026 at 6:42:14 PM
Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseekby djvdq
5/29/2026 at 9:57:27 PM
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.by KronisLV
5/30/2026 at 5:08:48 AM
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
by eisa01
5/30/2026 at 9:53:20 AM
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!
by KronisLV
5/30/2026 at 7:31:24 AM
Maybe on their pricing page?by djvdq
5/30/2026 at 4:52:41 AM
Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligenceby bermudi
5/30/2026 at 10:44:26 AM
> they've fallen into irrelevancy right nowIt's a very charitable take, as Mistral has never really left the realm of irrelevancy.
It's only a matter of time before EU falls back to hosting Chinese models in EU datacenters.
by raincole
5/29/2026 at 5:55:13 PM
Nobody trying to compete with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic should be playing the small models / local models game.Foundation model labs should be building very large reasoning models, then leaving it to the community to distill them down.
You can't scale a small model up, but you can scale a small model down.
I'm convinced the only way we'll have a seat at the table in the future and avoid total runaway takeoff is if there are very large models within 80% of the capabilities of the frontier models. Tiny RTX models do diddly squat to remain competitive.
Build open weights models for running on H200s. I'll spin them up on RunPod or Lambda.
by echelon
5/29/2026 at 6:31:07 PM
I do think there's a chance open weight models have a bit of a moment with the costs of frontier models growing on business balance sheets. It's unfortunate from my "privacy loving" PoV that it's mostly Chinese models filling the gap. ( the top models on openrouter for instance ).I have used Mistral models out of pure ideology for web agents and the like which aren't doing a lot of heavy lifting.
by farley13
5/29/2026 at 7:16:16 PM
Antirez’s Deepseek 4 Flash implementation that can run on MacBooks also was a revelation. It runs decently on M5 Max 128GB and it’s pointing out other bottlenecks like prefill speed which will improve.by theturtletalks
5/29/2026 at 6:25:28 PM
I thought distillation meant small models don't have to compete with the big models and can always eventually achieve close parity, but it's just a matter of time to do the distillation? (i.e. how much lag do you want to live with) Am I oversimplifying?by ahnick
5/29/2026 at 7:01:43 PM
There is likely a theoretical limit to how much intelligence you can pack into a model of a given size (especially when stretching that over a large input context size).Our evals are pretty complex so we only recently started testing ~30B class models, which are now becoming quite smart (on par with the frontier from 1 year ago). Mistral is far behind, but I'm rooting for them.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
by gertlabs
5/30/2026 at 6:13:46 PM
I think it really depends on what you’re doing. I use mistral for many tasks in https://phrasing.app and they blow models many times their size out of the water.None of my tasks use reasoning though (reasoning actually kills the performance) so perhaps that’s why. Still, I just had to rewrite my pipeline, and mistral was both faster, cheaper, and substantially better than any alternative
by barrell
5/29/2026 at 6:04:17 PM
We actually found the Mistral Small 4, quantized to 4bit was comparable to Qwen 3.6 27B and is roughly the same size. At least from our experience on our use cases, the quantization of the Mistral model worked far better than trying to quantize the Qwen family.Fully agree to your point though, Mistral in general is far behind where I'd expect and Qwen in particular is crushing it at the smaller sizes.
Personally, I'd consider anything 20B params and above a "medium" model. Small being <20B and large >100B. I think obviously we can get to the huge 1-2T param models, but frankly the margin of accuracy improvement for the speed hit is kinda insane (1-2% for many metrics).
by lettergram
5/29/2026 at 8:22:56 PM
It's all relative. For local use I'd classify it by hardware (VRAM size) using FP8 or Q6 quantization:1. tiny <2-3B -- easily runnable on lower-spec hardware
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 to the CPU/RAM), quality (heavy quantization, esp. at <= Q4), or price (investing in multi-GPU setups and/or server-grade hardware).
You could possibly split huge down further, as 70GB models (e.g. llama 3) are easier to get working than >120GB models and 1TB models are completely intractable.
by rhdunn
5/29/2026 at 8:58:41 PM
As a Mac user:1. tiny <2-3B -- could run in a browser even, mac neo
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
by sroussey
5/29/2026 at 9:42:04 PM
> tiny <2-3B -- could run in a browser even, mac neoOr 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).
by ElFitz
5/29/2026 at 7:59:21 PM
Yeah. I run LLM models locally and for me 22B-32B is the largest I'm willing to invest in trying out.Even though Mistral 4 has 6B active parameters per token (allowing 3-3.5 per token parameters to be loaded on a 4090), the ~240GB download + storage is pushing the limits of being able to try this out locally, especially if you are downloading and evaluating multiple models.
It also makes it harder for other people to make downstream finetunes like with what happened with the older Mistral/Magistral models.
by rhdunn
5/29/2026 at 10:21:01 PM
I think machines like the DGX Spark are about to become a lot more common/popular. It’s big enough to run sparse 150-250B MoEs with enough throughout for a single user. Deepseek v4 Flash is #1 (in terms of usage) on OpenRouter because it’s good enough to be useful. You can run it on a Spark (though it runs better across 2, which is getting up there in cost)by wolttam
5/30/2026 at 12:24:44 AM
I find Mistral Medium 3.5 with OpenCode is perfectly fine if you're willing to talk to it in a more fine-grained way about actual code. For me that's fine because even with huge frontier models I don't like trying to vibe prompt like a product manager.by chartpath
5/29/2026 at 7:11:04 PM
I don't agree that they are falling behind. Using both chat and cli I get what I need and it's comparable to "sota" when I compare.by coredev_
5/30/2026 at 10:05:54 AM
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.
by arkh
5/29/2026 at 10:10:19 PM
> a decent proxy would be to build models that get the r/localLlama crowd excitedI don’t really disagree with your post, but this is not exactly right. That subreddit seems to go from hype train to hype train every week, I haven’t found anything really insightful in it for quite a while now.
by kergonath
5/30/2026 at 4:48:56 AM
Nawh, they trained on test since Llama 2, no wonder.by thatsadude
5/29/2026 at 8:32:11 PM
Mistral is bad bad. For its use cases I feel like India’s Sarvam is doing better.by dyauspitr
5/29/2026 at 9:50:28 PM
channeling Rocky (extraterrestrial) there I see :)by ctrlkctrls