Comment by Topfi
5 hours ago
They slashed pricing, it's now nearly half vs the preview (Input: $0.7/M Tokens, Output: $2.1/M Tokens vs Input: $1.36/M Tokens, Output: $4.18/M Tokens).
At the original pricing in my evals, Mistral Large 4 Preview was not competitive. With this price point and some improvements on top, this full release warrants a major reassessment.
They didn't. Original price was maybe higher but they slashed it during preview and in fact it was lower by a bit ($0.68/M tokens) and $2.09 for output.
I've been using it for my personal project and it's still too expensive and very slow when thinking. I think we need one more generation from mistral and with maybe 50% of this already "slashed" price for this to be competitive (I use Opus 5.5 at work and it's still much better than this).
I just checked, seems you are right. They had roughly a week with the lower pricing, then increased it, now decrease it again. Very odd. My testing was with the higher pricing and looking at AA, theirs seems to have been too.
Given the size of the model, that's very aggressive pricing.
I wonder if it is serving at a loss to get training feedback (maybe using the margins they get from GLM 5.3 serving which is a slightly smaller model but double the price).
based on Anthropic's S1 no one is serving models at a loss, but cutting your price to keep usage high makes a lot of sense when you have your inference booked for long periods.
> They slashed pricing, it's now nearly half vs the preview (Input: $0.7/M Tokens, Output: $2.1/M Tokens vs Input: $1.36/M Tokens, Output: $4.18/M Tokens).
Those in the EU wanting EU-only inference should be aware Mistral put a 10% tax ("upcharge") on Regional Inference[1].
[1] https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/regional-inference
> this full release warrants a major reassessment.
I really don't think it does, the benchmark numbers are dreadful and the cost is higher than Sol. If you have to use an EU model knock yourself out but there are a ton of models that are a lot smarter for a lot less money.
You mean they didn't benchmaxx it? That's an extra reason to give it a try.
“You know how Einstein got bad grades? Well MINE are even WORSE!” - Calvin, to Hobbes
Why does everyone avoid publishing the most important part of the pricing while doing a comparison?
My coding sessions have a >97% input cache rate. DeepSeek got us spoiled. I am not going to use any AI provider with exorbitant or hidden cache rates.
They did, I just didn't include it: $0.07 cached input / M
So 10x-20x vs Deepseek v4.1 Flash and I don't have on hand how efficient Mistral is regarding cache hits, etc.
On the other hand, could be some decent competition lowering pricing if the models general performance warrants broad hosting.
Look at the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task. Mistral 4 is not competitive. https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-efficiency-tabs
Irregardless of wether or not Mistral Large 4 is competitive or not, I do not trust the AA numbers anymore, for various reasons. Them changing their numbers around so much recently brings the entire validity of this in question, not to mention if such a combined number is even important at all. The combined "intelligence" score of AA includes areas I do not care about or need at all.
seems better now, but still, it will be hard to compete. It's just that a direct comparison to frontier models will not speak to Mistrals favor.