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Grimblewald 11 hours ago [-]
Got curious, sign up, add money to account, try to use. Can't, it's a labs model. Fine, let's enable labs. Can't, unspecified error. Fine, lets contact customer support as instructed, can't no customer support, just a half-assed FAQ, that seems vibe-coded and searched poorly, totally irrelevant answers coming up for all queries tried. Then it hit me:
If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
thih9 6 hours ago [-]
> If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
They do! E.g. Cursor. See earlier discussions like "Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations"[1].
No one ever thought it made good customer support. It makes cheap customer support, and quite a lot of companies already have shitty customer support because they don't care about it being good, so they're thrilled to get to cut costs further.
It's "good" from the perspective of a company that's annoyed to have to spend money on actually fixing things.
puppymaster 8 hours ago [-]
I laughed and cried at this comment. It's so uncannily EU. Just spent 18 months landing an EU enterprise contract. Signed today and sent it back and got an automated message 'sorry will be on vacation til end of July...' This is the fourth vacation emails I got since corresponding with this contact window for the past 1 year.
throw1234567891 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, we have more vacation in the EU than people in the US.
falcor84 2 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely possible for individual employees to have generous vacations, while at the same time maintaining a continuously staffed support function.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, Europe has some great service cultures. (There was a recent comment citing an article contrasting its furniture and tech industries I’m having trouble finding.)
European tech’s service culture is just distinctly and notoriously terrible, even within Europe.
roysting 6 hours ago [-]
You would think Europeans would be masters of continuity than. But no, usually it is a form of narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others that just says “oh well, I guess you’ll have to just wait for me to get back from my vacation and on my terms to continue on with your life”.
It’s a common disgusting mentality wide spread across Europe.
bilekas 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s a common disgusting mentality wide spread across Europe.
Yeah it's such a disgusting mentality to appreciate a work life balance and not have work be your entire world. Such a horrible existence.
Anyway, I'm off on holidays now, enjoy!
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others
This has to be rage bait right? What kind of hellscape do you live in where other humans taking vacation and wanting that to be respected is selfish? And how do you not realize the irony in what you're complaining about? Do you never take a vacation where you actually disconnect from your work?
nkmnz 5 hours ago [-]
I am German living in Germany and yes, I think not organizing a holiday replacement when you leave for more than a week is a sign of negligence and indifference; but unfortunately, it becomes more and more common to behave in that way. Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders. I'd like to declare these ~10 weeks "individual contribution weeks" in which no one is allowed to do anything that needs the coordination of more than two persons.
dopidopHN2 5 hours ago [-]
Aaah the perfect German neighbors.
Always right, always on top of things.
What can you do? I guess we're in vacance? Oupsy. *shrug in french*
Bisous !
valesco 40 minutes ago [-]
Wait I'm Belgian and it is basically unheard of that a company cannot answer a customer's message for a month.
If it is a small company, then the owner will answer. If it is bigger, holidays will be planned so that no interruption will occur.
Companies can close completely for a week, usually between Christmas and New Year. That's all.
nok22kon 4 hours ago [-]
it's because there is no incentive in general in EU to be excellent at your job. good or bad, you get the same pay, and dont get compensated for bringing extra value to the company
so naturally employees have a "fuck you" attitude
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
Obviously untrue, any place on earth you get rewarded for being better at your job, either directly by being promoted or after asking/getting a higher salary, or indirectly by being able to change jobs by outright being better. This is true in most sectors, especially in software where it's really easy to switch jobs if you have the slightest amount of brain power.
Where are all these misconceptions come from? And how are they so far from reality they don't even pass the slightest of critical thinking?
nok22kon 4 hours ago [-]
so where are all the EU global software/tech companies? why is EU so reliant on US software? why do the best EU software developers move to US?
disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago [-]
Because the US has vastly larger capital markets, and they suck in money globally such that there's more funding for new, high risk reward software.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
> Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders
That's what, less than 8 weeks, in a year of 52 weeks, where things progress slower, and this is supposedly a big issue? And even if you know and understand that these other people are humans too, just like you, this is seen as "narcissism" and "selfishness", that they take vacations in the summer?
I'm sorry but this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest? I understand your point of view when we talk about huge corporate entities with thousands of employees, but even SMBs with like 200 employees end up in a situation where people with specific jobs will have to be unavailable for weeks (as again, they're human just like you) and you can't realistically hire people to replace those for just some weeks.
nok22kon 4 hours ago [-]
you are correct
but its also the reason for the lack of EU tech capability and over-reliance on US
usrusr 3 hours ago [-]
It might be a minor contributor, but it sure isn't the reason.
If you do do much admire economic success through suffering, can I assume that you have relocated to China? (mainland) Because they sure know a thing or two about that...
nok22kon 3 hours ago [-]
if you think the status quo is sustainable, and that Europeans can live a luxurious life fueled by cheap Chinese workers...
> BERLIN, June 26 (Reuters) - Volkswagen is considering shutting four German factories and ramping up job cuts to as many as 100,000, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday, in what could be the biggest ever overhaul in the industry.
I very much agree, the status quo is not sustainable. But I really don't believe that the solution is trying to one-up China in whatever they are doing, or the USA, for that matter.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
Besides the whole AI thing, what exact "tech capability" is missing in EU or Europe today? Most things been preferable to get from the US as workers are generally abused there for profits, so been cheaper, but capability still exists in Europe and is ramping up. Do you have any specific examples or you're just on the typical anti-EU HN tirade so many of you seem to fall into as soon as EU is even slightly related?
nok22kon 3 hours ago [-]
what is the EU equivalent to AWS/GCP/Azure?
or do you think EU doesnt really need that, it can just rent from the americans
what is the EU frontier AI model?
what is the EU frontier chip fabs?
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
> what is the EU frontier chip fabs?
Where are the US or Chinese equivalents or betters of ASML of the Netherlands?
nok22kon 2 hours ago [-]
ASML had $30 bil revenue in 2025
it's main client, TSMC had 4x, $120 bil revenue in 2024
the Chinese equivalents are 5 years away
sounds like VW from 10 years ago - "Chinese can't make quality cars"
jdiff 6 hours ago [-]
Is this a joke you're attempting? You're raging out about someone else being so narcissistic for not letting you continue on with your whole entire life because they took a vacation?
throw1234567891 3 hours ago [-]
You wanna talk disgusting? Let’s talk about your president.
Orygin 4 hours ago [-]
> narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others
Oh the irony
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
How is people having reasonable work place environments related to shit customer support and companies trying to optimize for reducing costs? Seems highly unrelated.
begleri 9 hours ago [-]
That's frustrating and odd because I can use the model for free (have never connected any form of payment)
henryrobbins00 4 hours ago [-]
Really? I get a 403 that I must enable Lab models on https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy. When I try to do that, it gives "There was an error trying to update the Labs setting."
Do you have that Labs setting enabled? When I contacted support, they said "enabling Labs models isn't available for self-serve activation on standard individual accounts." Do you have a different type of account?
criticalfault 10 hours ago [-]
These guys don't answer emails. Same for qwant.
Sample of two, but I'm assuming french companies don't like to being contacted n English.
MrToadMan 9 hours ago [-]
If only they had access to a world class translation system, they could auto translate between languages effortlessly :)
GTP 8 hours ago [-]
They're just offended by people not using their product :D
zelphirkalt 6 hours ago [-]
Wasn't there a thread recently, about them disappointingly being also just a US company, just with an office in France?
Mashimo 10 hours ago [-]
Further down someone said the support is great and they respond within the day.
blueTiger33 6 hours ago [-]
they are working on LeChaton fat
SimonMistral 2 hours ago [-]
Fixed, sorry for that!
tmikaeld 11 hours ago [-]
This isn’t the first time. I’m amazed at how they manage to fumble releases over and over …
gregman1 9 hours ago [-]
“Don’t get high on your own supply” - I think it’s Microsoft’s motto.
adithyassekhar 11 hours ago [-]
Because that AI will either expose their business or it will be so nerfed it’s useless.
roysting 6 hours ago [-]
Mostly political, economic, and social ramifications.
henryrobbins00 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
helloplanets 8 hours ago [-]
Tangential, but I'm pretty sad about EU having absolutely nothing in the actual SotA LLM market. Especially given the recent events of US completely restricting the actual SotA models.
Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
troyvit 2 hours ago [-]
Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do.
Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
msdz 1 hours ago [-]
> Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
For the most part, yes.
France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago.
Software in general, AI as well, is a rich get richer market. The big American companies can afford to (and very much do) scoop up European talents and upcoming European companies. And if they don't want to buy them, they can undercut them to bankruptcy. We live in a colony economy, with human capital as the raw produce, and it all gets funneled to the USA.
The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago [-]
Europeans should thank Trump for that. Digital sovereignty became a major theme mostly because his hollow head could not comprehend the previous strategy.
I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this.
That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money.
If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back.
I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.
mike_hearn 6 hours ago [-]
Mistral has raised $4B+ which is a decent chunk of change, albeit not in the league of OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI.
The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons).
Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either.
But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training.
There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes!
And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages.
So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.
ghm2199 6 hours ago [-]
Someone commented on this page that their main market are long term b2b contracts. If that’s true then what you are saying isn’t a problem.
derfurth 4 hours ago [-]
One could make the case that being SotA in 2026 is very costly and not that important for being SotA in 2030 if much more efficient models indeed happens.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
How much does supporting multiple languages as first-class citizens (versus adding a translation layer) cost a model?
anthonypasq 2 hours ago [-]
absolutely nothing id imagine? you think all the chinese are using their models in english?
Sol- 7 hours ago [-]
The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.
Epa095 7 hours ago [-]
I agree with your analysis, at least as long as we shall remain strictly inside the free market methodologies. And having a common capital market would be good no matter what.
But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.
and now they get to sit in the chair in the corner and watch as its citizens use American and Chinese models.
pbkompasz 2 hours ago [-]
They already stole all the data on the internet to train their models. These models haven't improved significantly in some time and remember that they lose money on every query. Why should anyone outside does companies get involved now, right before the whole show is about to collapse?
yfontana 7 hours ago [-]
That act applies just as much to those American and Chinese models within the EU.
Sol- 7 hours ago [-]
Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
roblabla 6 hours ago [-]
[citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
mike_hearn 6 hours ago [-]
AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads).
Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
roblabla 4 hours ago [-]
You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
---
Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
nkmnz 5 hours ago [-]
"The tech sector is still well and alive in EU" [citation needed]
The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector.
Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...
So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
Orygin 4 hours ago [-]
Citation: Anybody working in tech in Europe can tell you this.
petesergeant 7 hours ago [-]
Given that American and Chinese models exist in an environment where the executive can and will pull models because the vibes are off, or they don't think a company is sufficiently deferential or politically aligned, this feels like false attribution.
henryrobbins00 12 hours ago [-]
What a coincidence! I just released OpenATP earlier today. OpenATP is an open-source Python package and CLI for agentic automated theorem provers. It includes support for Leanstral with Mistral’s Vibe harness. The previous production Leanstral model was deprecated on May 22nd. I will update the package to point to Leanstral 1.5 ASAP!
I'm not sure I understand the Weights policy. This site says the weights are Apache-licensed, suggesting it's open weights. But I can't find a download link. Their Huggingface profile seems to only provide an earlier snapshot [0]. Any pointers on whether/where we can or will be able to download the weights?
"Page not found" for me. Did you manage to access this? What is this about?
sveinbjornp 7 hours ago [-]
from the web archive:
Leanstral 1.5 - June 30, 2026
An updated Lean 4 formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization. 119B total parameters, 6.5B active.
Lean 4 and Idris 2 are underrated, and likely great for LLM's to code in (since they provide additional guarantees)
butokai 8 hours ago [-]
I am getting 404 right now
Ajoha 5 hours ago [-]
Registered due this news. But I must connect to GitHub to use "Code"? That seems limited?
impodimium 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting that this only specialized for Lean4 and not for similar like Coq
DoctorOetker 12 hours ago [-]
I would have preferred actual proof objects, as in Metamath's: separate the actual proof from the heuristics used to find it (also valuable, but a different thing).
esafak 16 hours ago [-]
Is this useful for specifying programs too or only theorems?
zeckalpha 16 hours ago [-]
Curry-Howard correspondence.
esafak 11 hours ago [-]
It may be theoretically possible, but is it ergonomic and useful? Do you use Lean for your programs?
siknad 4 hours ago [-]
Lean is intended by its authors to be also used as a general-purpose programming language. Lean stdlib contains an HTTP server for example.
IMO the biggest problems are the lack of documentation, instability and poor ecosystem. There are user libraries for some programming tasks (e.g. HTTP router, graphics API bindings) but they are mostly proofs of concept and not actively developed or maintained.
I used Lean for AoC last time and it’s really good.
doctorpangloss 17 hours ago [-]
Real talk, does anyone use anything from Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing? Or is it only used "because EU"? Just focus on answering the question. I wonder if anyone has observed it perform better on any objective metric in any rigorous setting.
ashenke 15 hours ago [-]
I use their Voxtral Mini STT audio model to automatically transcribe my podcasts into markdown.
Out of all the STT models I've tried, it's both the best performing and one of the cheapest!
It's really accurate, feeding the episode notes and the podcast description ensures all names are properly spelled, and speaker diarization works really great.
(I just do a Gemini flash pass at the end to identify the speakers, so it shows the host name instead of "Speaker 1")
Confiks 15 hours ago [-]
For writing and languange learning it's very decent, especially Mistral Large. The pricing is very good too. I really like the consistently low time to first token and good token per second. Claude, especially in the past, would be very inconsistent, often with outages. Mistral mostly just always works and is very fast.
Technical questions are unfortunately hit or miss. I'm lately pretty much always using a system prompt that emphasizes short answers [1], and Opus regularly one-shots it while Mistral needs a follow up. I use big-AGI as a model router [2] (dumb name, great software), which makes switching midway very easy though. For coding I'm still using Claude Code mostly out of inertia (although I really want to move to an OSS harness) and the one time I tried their `vibe` tool months ago it was a bit rough.
Mistral TTS with diarization is also great and cheap. That's the only thing for which I use their web UI.
[1] Give a short but helpful answer to the question the user asks. When helping with a computer-related task, unless the user asks, don't give any installation or setup instructions, but just get straight to the point. When the user asks a follow up question, give a more complete and longer answer while still not overexplaining. When the user prefaces the question with "short mode off" in any question, give a full and well considered reply.
vibe has improved _a lot_ during the past few months, fyi.
The new Mistral Medium 3.5 is also a big improvement over devstral-2
BartjeD 10 hours ago [-]
Mistral doesn't have caching on batches. For me that meant they are 10x more expensive than Google.
I think its dumb.
Their support is hidden away in a chat bubble at the bottom. But they do respond promptly.
Its decent, but after switching to Google i wouldn't go back
troyvit 17 hours ago [-]
We are not Mistral's target audience. For instance I don't know if Leanstral performs the best as a "formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization" because I don't even know wth that is or who else does it.
Mistral themselves focus more on b2b; financial services, manufacturing, stuff like that, and they get some big clients that way.
Despite not being their target, I started using them because they have many open models. I continue using them because, yeah EU, but also because the community is great and the tool makes me think more than Claude does. Last, I stick with them because they are one of the few AI companies that are up-front about their environmental impact and are actually trying to minimize it while still providing a decent product.
If you can express a solution in Lean you can formally prove or disprove it. Formal verification is making a debut in traditional engineering toolkits.
lexoj 2 hours ago [-]
I used them because they had the fastest chat response. (Dont think that’s the case anymore, and they introduced some UI blocking feature on load which is irritating, but still use it mainly due to habit)
istinetz 7 hours ago [-]
For a defense project we're working on, we basically have a hard requirement to use european cloud provider + european llm
We cannot use open source LLMs on-prem, I asked. So that's basically a hard requirement to use mistral, even though Chinese models are strictly better on every dimension.
angry_octet 3 hours ago [-]
Is there a rationale behind why not on prem? Boogeyman fears about LLMs? No hardware? Or do you mean, no Chinese LLMs?
psalaun 11 hours ago [-]
I use it as my workhorse for coding and general chat questions, because it's good enough 80% of the time, and indeed it's french/european (with heavy US capital tho...).
We complain too much about not having enough major competitors in the IT space, to not support a burgeoning one even if it's less powerful than SOTA labs
barrenko 10 hours ago [-]
Well, if you're a taxpayer in EU you're already supporting it implicitly.
data-ottawa 16 hours ago [-]
Mistral medium is considerably better at writing than Opus.
I’ve also found it very good at pulling info from pdfs. Even a complicated festival with multiple venues and timetables.
tjwebbnorfolk 14 hours ago [-]
Writing what? I found it worse than gemma4 at coding even though it's 4x the parameter size
Adrig 16 hours ago [-]
A few months ago, I had some data cleaning to do; their small model was surprisingly efficient and got the job done for 0.2x what I expected to run (Anthropic Sonnet / Haiku). Their TTS / STT is also roughly at the frontier, at least for French.
But I admit I only consider them because they're from France. Haven't seen a dimension where they're competitive for general users
adev_ 16 hours ago [-]
> Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing?
I am. I use them primarily through their vibe CLI.
Reason is simple: They are cheaper (by almost one order of magnitude compared to Claude) and still do the job pretty well.
For small programming tasks, quick prototyping, refactoring or anything verbose and not requiring a context too large: I first go to Mistral and then eventually to Claude if I'm unsatisfied.
I also found out some of their models to be more responsive than OpenAI ones (which is not so surprising considering the size).
My tasks are mainly C++ and Python programming. People in other languages might not share my enthusiasm.
jatora 15 hours ago [-]
Your reason can't be cost because there are superior models that are cheaper than Mistral models, for coding. So i re-ask the question
adev_ 15 hours ago [-]
> Your reason can't be cost because there are superior models that are cheaper than Mistral models
Nope. This is not my experience.
Public pricing in token/$ is only part of the equation.
Mistral tooling to consume significantly less tokens-per-given-task than the Anthropic ones.
My bills currently reflects that.
tjwebbnorfolk 14 hours ago [-]
I think other commenter is talking about smaller/cheaper models like Qwen that outperform mistral on just about every metric
adev_ 9 hours ago [-]
I played with Qwen few months ago, I do prefer Mistral vibe for everyday usage (significantly faster if not self hosted).
greenavocado 13 hours ago [-]
Compare to Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 you will be shocked
trentor 17 hours ago [-]
I like the models for creative writing. They have a distinct voice that is different from the other llms.
SwellJoe 16 hours ago [-]
I made a game (https://prose-or-con.com) where you pick whether writing is AI or human. Mistral is a bonkers weird writer. So weird I fell for it a couple of times because I thought, "No way a model writes this weird." Not, like, incorrect grammar or spelling or anything, just...off-kilter. Kinda sassy.
vlian2088 12 hours ago [-]
needs a leaderboard of models most often mistaken for humans.
SwellJoe 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's on the todo list, but I need more data. Only a half dozen people have played it and submitted a score. I'm storing the hashes of passages people got right and wrong so I can make exactly that chart at some point. I think both "the most human-like AI" and "the most AI-like human" are both interesting pieces of data, but I don't know either yet.
vlian2088 11 hours ago [-]
try posting it on r/localllama and r/sillytavernai
hakunin 15 hours ago [-]
I use it because it’s a simple, convenient and cheap OCR api. Specifically via my ringbinder[1] tool.
I use it because EU and API pricing is decent to me. And support is awesome also. They reply the same day or at most the next day, and they follow the ticket great. It isn't that bad, but neither the best.
jatora 15 hours ago [-]
Why do you need support so often?
suprjami 12 hours ago [-]
I still prefer Mistral Nemo 12B for text summarisation tasks. It has a nice style. The Mistral Small 24B is also decent. I have a YouTube transcript summariser which I like these for.
However these days I usually have Qwen 3.6 27B already loaded so I mostly just use that instead.
Hamuko 11 hours ago [-]
>Just focus on answering the question.
Are you trying to instruct me like an LLM?
anonyfox 6 hours ago [-]
just used mistral for a database/scraping creation tool and ended at <10k€ in token costs (via openrouter), beating gpt5.4-mini in output quality and speed and costs after actual testing A/B fairly. so its a super scoped task to be performed hundreds of thousands of time for some automation and mistral just did it better across all dimensions that gpt-5.4-mini. of course thats not a headline in terms of frontier model competitiveness, but for "the boring parts" it just was flat out better than anything else consistently. bonus points it handles mixed-language-content with nuances surprisingly well to turn web content in the wild into structured data really good and fast.
refulgentis 15 hours ago [-]
OCR is off the charts good on every metric you can think of.
LLMs are a near-afterthought at this point if you don’t have data residency requirements. I love them and they’re slightly underrated, their models are consistently well-trained, open, but as you note, behind. There is no metric that will say they’re ahead in anything.
cavenditti 9 hours ago [-]
This. Best OCR provider by measure and it’s been for years
urbsgpw 7 hours ago [-]
Hmm, not sure I'd agree. I really like google's offering there (they suck at coding agents but their OCR is good value for money - well up till the latest flash model which has got wicked expensive). See also https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard
I know these leaderboards are iffy, but at least my experience has been somewhat similar.
refulgentis 1 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this, I’ve had some disquiet around the release blogs…something felt cherry-picked and I didn’t know there was a 3rd party source for evals, that settles it easily - like you said they can be iffy but there’s a clear enough gap and large set of models for me to let go of the idea it’s the best by some margin.
bee_rider 12 hours ago [-]
I liked that their website didn’t ask for my phone number, IIRC.
mertleee 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
beernet 9 hours ago [-]
This went to market horribly (if you can even call it that), just look at the comments. Mistral played themselves big time over the past ~18 months. Non-competitive products and models combined with bad marketing and GTM...Oh Europe
If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
They do! E.g. Cursor. See earlier discussions like "Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations"[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012
It's "good" from the perspective of a company that's annoyed to have to spend money on actually fixing things.
European tech’s service culture is just distinctly and notoriously terrible, even within Europe.
It’s a common disgusting mentality wide spread across Europe.
Yeah it's such a disgusting mentality to appreciate a work life balance and not have work be your entire world. Such a horrible existence.
Anyway, I'm off on holidays now, enjoy!
This has to be rage bait right? What kind of hellscape do you live in where other humans taking vacation and wanting that to be respected is selfish? And how do you not realize the irony in what you're complaining about? Do you never take a vacation where you actually disconnect from your work?
Always right, always on top of things.
What can you do? I guess we're in vacance? Oupsy. *shrug in french*
Bisous !
If it is a small company, then the owner will answer. If it is bigger, holidays will be planned so that no interruption will occur.
Companies can close completely for a week, usually between Christmas and New Year. That's all.
so naturally employees have a "fuck you" attitude
Where are all these misconceptions come from? And how are they so far from reality they don't even pass the slightest of critical thinking?
That's what, less than 8 weeks, in a year of 52 weeks, where things progress slower, and this is supposedly a big issue? And even if you know and understand that these other people are humans too, just like you, this is seen as "narcissism" and "selfishness", that they take vacations in the summer?
I'm sorry but this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest? I understand your point of view when we talk about huge corporate entities with thousands of employees, but even SMBs with like 200 employees end up in a situation where people with specific jobs will have to be unavailable for weeks (as again, they're human just like you) and you can't realistically hire people to replace those for just some weeks.
but its also the reason for the lack of EU tech capability and over-reliance on US
If you do do much admire economic success through suffering, can I assume that you have relocated to China? (mainland) Because they sure know a thing or two about that...
> BERLIN, June 26 (Reuters) - Volkswagen is considering shutting four German factories and ramping up job cuts to as many as 100,000, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday, in what could be the biggest ever overhaul in the industry.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
or do you think EU doesnt really need that, it can just rent from the americans
what is the EU frontier AI model?
what is the EU frontier chip fabs?
Where are the US or Chinese equivalents or betters of ASML of the Netherlands?
it's main client, TSMC had 4x, $120 bil revenue in 2024
the Chinese equivalents are 5 years away
sounds like VW from 10 years ago - "Chinese can't make quality cars"
Oh the irony
Do you have that Labs setting enabled? When I contacted support, they said "enabling Labs models isn't available for self-serve activation on standard individual accounts." Do you have a different type of account?
Sample of two, but I'm assuming french companies don't like to being contacted n English.
Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
For the most part, yes.
France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago.
It's a pity, really.
[1] (in German) https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-fronti...
The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.
I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this.
That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money.
If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back.
I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.
The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons).
Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either.
But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training.
There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes!
https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-l...
And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages.
So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.
But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.
and now they get to sit in the chair in the corner and watch as its citizens use American and Chinese models.
Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
---
Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champio...
https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-...
The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector.
Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...
So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
GitHub: https://github.com/henryrobbins/open-atp
Docs: https://open-atp.henryrobbins.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20260630223430/https://docs.mist...
[0] https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Leanstral-2603
Leanstral 1.5 - June 30, 2026 An updated Lean 4 formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization. 119B total parameters, 6.5B active.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260630223430/https://docs.mist...
IMO the biggest problems are the lack of documentation, instability and poor ecosystem. There are user libraries for some programming tasks (e.g. HTTP router, graphics API bindings) but they are mostly proofs of concept and not actively developed or maintained.
Technical questions are unfortunately hit or miss. I'm lately pretty much always using a system prompt that emphasizes short answers [1], and Opus regularly one-shots it while Mistral needs a follow up. I use big-AGI as a model router [2] (dumb name, great software), which makes switching midway very easy though. For coding I'm still using Claude Code mostly out of inertia (although I really want to move to an OSS harness) and the one time I tried their `vibe` tool months ago it was a bit rough.
Mistral TTS with diarization is also great and cheap. That's the only thing for which I use their web UI.
[1] Give a short but helpful answer to the question the user asks. When helping with a computer-related task, unless the user asks, don't give any installation or setup instructions, but just get straight to the point. When the user asks a follow up question, give a more complete and longer answer while still not overexplaining. When the user prefaces the question with "short mode off" in any question, give a full and well considered reply.
[2] https://github.com/enricoros/big-AGI
The new Mistral Medium 3.5 is also a big improvement over devstral-2
I think its dumb.
Their support is hidden away in a chat bubble at the bottom. But they do respond promptly.
Its decent, but after switching to Google i wouldn't go back
Mistral themselves focus more on b2b; financial services, manufacturing, stuff like that, and they get some big clients that way.
Despite not being their target, I started using them because they have many open models. I continue using them because, yeah EU, but also because the community is great and the tool makes me think more than Claude does. Last, I stick with them because they are one of the few AI companies that are up-front about their environmental impact and are actually trying to minimize it while still providing a decent product.
If you can express a solution in Lean you can formally prove or disprove it. Formal verification is making a debut in traditional engineering toolkits.
We cannot use open source LLMs on-prem, I asked. So that's basically a hard requirement to use mistral, even though Chinese models are strictly better on every dimension.
We complain too much about not having enough major competitors in the IT space, to not support a burgeoning one even if it's less powerful than SOTA labs
I’ve also found it very good at pulling info from pdfs. Even a complicated festival with multiple venues and timetables.
But I admit I only consider them because they're from France. Haven't seen a dimension where they're competitive for general users
I am. I use them primarily through their vibe CLI.
Reason is simple: They are cheaper (by almost one order of magnitude compared to Claude) and still do the job pretty well.
For small programming tasks, quick prototyping, refactoring or anything verbose and not requiring a context too large: I first go to Mistral and then eventually to Claude if I'm unsatisfied.
I also found out some of their models to be more responsive than OpenAI ones (which is not so surprising considering the size).
My tasks are mainly C++ and Python programming. People in other languages might not share my enthusiasm.
Nope. This is not my experience.
Public pricing in token/$ is only part of the equation.
Mistral tooling to consume significantly less tokens-per-given-task than the Anthropic ones.
My bills currently reflects that.
[1]: https://github.com/maxim/ringbinder
However these days I usually have Qwen 3.6 27B already loaded so I mostly just use that instead.
Are you trying to instruct me like an LLM?
LLMs are a near-afterthought at this point if you don’t have data residency requirements. I love them and they’re slightly underrated, their models are consistently well-trained, open, but as you note, behind. There is no metric that will say they’re ahead in anything.