10 ms·

Announcing 2 new non-open source models, and they won't even release the previous mistral medium? I did not expect... well I did expect this, but I did not thin

• newswasboring 3y ago
  The path to enshittification is getting shorter and shorter.
  • shuckles 3y ago
    If "enshittification" includes "companies improving products but not making improvements available for free use by others", then it's a meaningless term.
    • newswasboring 3y ago
      Enshittification means companies breaking the social contract they started with, and in some cases like openAI completely reverse it. You can't have "Open Weights models" as your tag line and just proceed to become exactly not that. That is enshittification by any standards.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        It's more about companies going from offering good value to their users, to extracting value from their userbase, and the changes to the produy along the way, as Cory Doctorow coined it. Put that way, is Mistrial changiy directions not releasing future models that? I don't disagree that this move sucks, but it's not like they just changed a secret setting so their model you're currently running on your computer is now secretly uploading your incognito browsing habits to their servers. They changed what they're going to sell/release, going forwards, but that's it. No users got abused here, from my POV, but maybe I'm not seeing it.
      • shuckles 3y ago
        No, enshittification as proposed as a term for marketplace operators or platform providers who slowly degrade the experience for dependent users in order to capture more of the value created. Mistral is not a platform; it's a technology vendor. You can apply words however arbitrarily you want, but it just makes them meaningless.
  • machdiamonds 3y ago
    Not sure why people on HN can't understand that companies actually need to make money to survive.
    • Zambyte 3y ago
      A systemic problem is still a problem.
    • chadash 3y ago
      I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        The chef made his entire reputation by publishing cookbooks, and practically overnight pivoted from loudly proclaiming how important it was to share recipes to refusing to share anything and telling people to just eat at his restaurant.
        • fragmede 3y ago
          Where this analogy falls flat, is the fact that I can take the "food", the model, and copy it an infinite amount of times, and use it to open my own, competing restaurant, who's food is as delicious as the original chef's. It'll differ some in presentation, but it's still gonna be a really really good cut of high end steak that was heated just right and melts in your mouth in all the right ways, without me having to put in any of the work it took to get there, which means my overhead is way lower. Suddenly, this chef has to compete with my fast food knock-off of their Michelin star restaurant. Some people like paying $400 for a meal for the experience, but it turns out more people just wanna be fed and are cheap, and can't or don't want to pay for the Michelin dining experience when the food is of equal quality in this tortured analogy. No one goes to the original chef's restaurant, and they go out of business. The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.
• sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s so frustrating because there’s no downside in releasing the weights. OpenAI could open GPT 4 tomorrow and it wouldn’t meaningfully impact their revenue. No one has even tried.
  • nulld3v 3y ago
    > OpenAI could open GPT 4 tomorrow and it wouldn’t meaningfully impact their revenue. I find this very difficult to believe, GPT-4 is still the best public model. If they hand out the weights other companies will immediately release APIs for it, cannibalizing OpenAI's API sales.
    • sillysaurusx 3y ago
      That’s the theory. In practice, it requires immense infrastructure to run it, let alone all the tooling and sales pipelines surrounding it. Companies are risk averse by definition, and in practice the risks are usually different than the ones you imagine from first principles. It’s dumb. The first company to prove this will hopefully set an example that will be noticed.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        Ollama makes it pretty easy to run inference on a bunch of model-available releases. If a company is after code/text generation, finding a company/contractor to fine tune one of the model-available releases on their source code, and have IT deploy Ollama to ask their employees with M3 MacBooks, decked out with 64 GiB of RAM is well within the abilities of a competent and well funded IT department. What recognition has Facebook gotten for their model releases? How has that been priced into their stock price?
        • viraptor 3y ago
          That's completely different scale. You're not going to run GPT4 like a random ollama model. At that point you need dedicated external hardware for the service, and proper batching/pipelining to utilise it well. This is way out of the "enough ram in the laptop area".
• irthomasthomas 3y ago
  Per you link, they also removed these quotes: In your hands Our products comes with transparent access to our weights, permitting full customisation. We don't want your data! Committing to open models. We believe in open science, community and free software. We release many of our models and deployment tools under permissive licenses. We benefit from the OSS community, and give back. Edit: this is pretty fucking sad, and the fact that it's become expected is... I dunno, a tragedy? I mean, the whole point of anti-trust law was that monopolies like this are a net negative to the economy and to social and technological progress. They are BAD for business for everyone except the monopolist.
  • ipsum2 3y ago
    Exactly who is a monopoly? There are 4-5 separate companies with models as good as mistral.
    • MyFirstSass 3y ago
      There really isn't though? I've not seen anything close to Mistral yet in the 7b space - and it's even going downhill, Gemma is a total joke surprisingly, almost non functional.
      • dash2 3y ago
        Not having (yet) produced as good a product is not evidence of a monopoly!
        • irthomasthomas 3y ago
          And raising prices to match that of the highest priced competitor (gpt-4-turbo), also owned by Microsoft. Is price fixing not evidence of monopolistic behaviour?
          • dash2 3y ago
            Cartel behaviour. But ok, that is more compelling for the general point.
• deleted 3y ago
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• sireat 3y ago
  Frankly this is very upsetting. Guess everyone has their price. Mistral was a forerunner for LLM recommendation for a large European organization. Part of the reason was that Mistral had promised not only open weights but eventually open architecture. Instead, we get yet another closed source, pray for unaltered prompts SaaS.