Comment by ogou
17 hours ago
Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.
Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.
I also think that this is the best approach for businesses wanting to adopt AI to automate, streamline, etc their business.
The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.
If they can pull ahead in having the most number of pre-trained models (one for this ERP, one for that CRM, etc) and then being able to close sales to companies using these products and sell them on post-trained (give us your specific ERP customisations and we'll give you access to a model that is tailored to your business), then THAT is a moat.
But they need to do this without fanfare. Just close sales, and keep closing, basically. After all, even if other AI providers copy the process, the moat would already have been established for Mistral.
> The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.
My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.
> My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.
I hope you are right (I am in the process of finalising a product and one of the top-5 selling points contains "outside the jurisdiction of the US"), but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.
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Meh, I feel like we are in the "cloud is bad phase" all over again.
Companies will use US ai models without issues in a few years.
Mistral is still hosted on US providers, their EU centers are only in planning. Data access aside, if AWS or Azure (or Cloudflare) are ordered to pull the plug, it's still goodbye Mistral. Unless you use a third party hoster that is, or do it yourself of course - already possible.
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This moat doesn't seem to be much of a moat considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage - except DeepSeek, which would be a strange choice for Europeans looking for data sovereignty.
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Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.
> Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.
I have not seen that, actually. I still see most companies who want to jump into AI for the business sort of try RAG, but more often they just buy Chat accounts for their users.
The only place that harnesses appear to be used is in software development, but most companies aren't doing that either.
> Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off.
Isn't the entire deal with LLMs that they are trained as megaliths? How can bespoke modelling overcome the treasure trove of knowledge that megaliths can generically bring in, even in bespoke scenarios?
ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond. Within those, agents can have sub agents (like when it does research).
When generating images most services will have a small agent that rewrites your request and hands it off to the generative image model.
So from the treasure trove point of view, optimized agents have their place. From companies building pipelines, they also have their place.
> ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond.
Right, but this was done to value-optimize the product, i.e. try to always give you the shittiest (cheapest) model you can bear, because otherwise people would always choose the smartest (most expensive) model for any query.
Taking away the model choice from the user introduces a lot of ways to cut down costs, but one thing it does not do is make the product give users better/more reliable answers.
> Isn't the entire deal with LLMs that they are trained as megaliths? How can bespoke modelling overcome the treasure trove of knowledge that megaliths can generically bring in, even in bespoke scenarios?
Think of it as a base model (the megalith) which then has the weights adjusted towards a specific use-case (SAP, for example).
The companies I work want onprem models, and no Chinese ones. Does mistral support onprem? ( For a price)
Agreed. I’ve used their platform to train smaller, specialized models. Something I could have done in Codelab or some other tool, but their platform allows me to just upload a training set and as soon as it finishes I have a hosted model available at an endpoint. It obviously has some constraints compared to running the training yourself, but it also opens up the opportunity to way more people.
Indeed, but even for coding use cases, Vibe is more of a focused “refactor/ write this function” aid than “write me an app” and it can work locally. For me that’s a lot more valuable as an accelerator to my workflow where the developer stays in control and fully involved in the process.
I agree. Just started using it. Can you give some examples of fields you maybe even prefer Mistral?
I use a pretty lightweight local Mistral model in LM studio for both creative and technical writing/iterating and it’s fantastic.
Yes, since it's not American, it will be the de-facto choice for most big European companies.
Why would that be? Most big EU companies use ms teams or google workspace, for example.
They use those because the decision to use them was made years ago. Things have changed since then
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Is this the best Grok alternative?
Any model is.
This sounds like an ideology based reply. Grok is underrated and I think has a better chance of long term success than most. The current growth strategy means (for me) their chat harness is not up to par for serious work.
Their API is consistently among the most used on OpenRouter. While I can’t vouch for it myself, I think this is a decent proxy for capability. You can definitely see glimmers of greatness in their chat interface, it just feels like the system prompts are focused on something that doesn’t interest me.
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If you couldn't use the words Europe to describe why you'd chose Mistral, you'd have no good reasons to choose Mistral.
Its just not good. Its bottom floor for LLMs.
> Its bottom floor for LLMs.
What? That's just demonstrably false. The market doesn't consist of 5 providers.
You know about LMarena? I just looked it up, Mistral is number 59 on the list.
Free Chinese models are better than it.
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