Comment by baq
1 day ago
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.
DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.
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)
Interesting - which models specifically? I'd be interested in using mistral over deepseek if it was competitive (guess I need to go benchmark)
Because they distill
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.
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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)
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Why doesn't Mistral distill?
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I suppose losing with dignity is a consolation.
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.
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
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Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligence