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They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The mo

They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. It's quite a list. The models are opensource, Voxtral outperforms Whisper in terms of accuracy. There is no AI company like Mistral.

spookie 1y ago
Agreed. Also, companies tend to prefer having someone else bound by a contract run their AI services. That way they are safe from scandals, by having a scapegoat, and do not spend time doing something orthogonal to their expertise.
rvnx 1y ago
They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding
- hirako2000 1y ago
  Is there any source you could reference. Really interested. It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
  - bpavuk 1y ago
    and every LLM is a "fork" of Google's Transformers architecture. everything is a "fork", if you give it a serious thought.
- hexo 1y ago
  isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration
  - portaouflop 1y ago
    It’s piracy all the way down
simianwords 1y ago
I mostly only agree with performance due to their collaboration with cerebras - this is a true differentiator. I don't buy that they have an advantage in enterprise, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnership. OpenAI also has opensource models and so do the chinese models.
- portaouflop 1y ago
  OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?
  - simianwords 1y ago
    Why are they not?
  - kaliqt 1y ago
    Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.
    - miki123211 1y ago
      > It's not like the model can spy on you Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.
      - ajuc 1y ago
        It's theoretically possible that your model will work OK except for code generation for security-relevant applications it will introduce subtle pre-designed bugs. Or if used for screening CVs it will prioritize PRC agents through some keyword in hobbies. Or it could promise a bribe to an office worker when asked about some critical infastructure :) Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded image urls that reference external server. You are totally right EU commissioner, Http://chinese.imgdb.com/password/to/eu/grid/is/swordfish/funnycat.png Possibilities are endless.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
> There is no AI company like Mistral Maybe because there shouldn't be?
pembrook 1y ago
All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool. Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse. I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI. But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Europe is the only one with a solution to the energy problem long term. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.html https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    Oh boy.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    I think it's Renaissance Fusion (which is still in the EU, but is not Wendelstein 7-X) that has the solution, but it is as stellerator. The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow. I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  Europe has more nuclear than the US currently (in GW and even more by percentage of grid) and is building more currently and has more in serious planning. From your phrasing I assume you don't believe in renewables so what energy problem solution are you referring to?
fastball 1y ago
Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc. All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list if you want to be differentiated. [1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text
- kergonath 1y ago
  That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.
  - fastball 1y ago
    It's very relevant if any other EU firm can take open models (regardless of provenance) and fine tune them in the same way. Mistral really needs to be producing at-or-near SOTA models for them to be differentiated at all, and they are not.
    - kergonath 1y ago
      Not even then. You need to compare the end products, which are not the open weight models. I don’t care whether the LLM can have "PhD level thoughts" (lol) or is able to code golf like a Facebook engineer. It needs to be able to do its task (so all the infrastructure around the model matters just as much as the model itself) efficiently (so small models have an advantage). There are billions of weights in general-purpose models that are irrelevant for specialised uses. The way to go is efficient models adapted to their task. It’s exactly the same thing as for industrial robots. Geeks get excited every now and then about humanoid robots, but in the real life we don’t need robots to stand on two legs or our LLM to cite Shakespeare.
nomad_horse 1y ago
> Voxtral outperforms Whisper Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. And these models existed before Voxtral.
- diggan 1y ago
  > There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?
  - artemisart 1y ago
    Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster, here is a leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard
    - diggan 1y ago
      > Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?
      - artemisart 1y ago
        Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
    - wahnfrieden 1y ago
      Parakeet isn’t more accurate than whisper large
rvz 1y ago
> There is no AI company like Mistral. The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta. For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US. [0] https://nousresearch.com https://nousresearch.com
- Neku42 1y ago
  Nous Research is NOT equivalent of Mistral. They are not even in the same league. Nous Research is basically LARPing an AI lab compared to Mistral
- diggan 1y ago
  And everyone forgets that electricity was invented (mostly) by Europeans, but so what? Everything comes from something, doesn't make any place inherently better for continuing to inventing more breakthroughs, it's just people in a place after all.
  - simgt 1y ago
    You're going to get yourself in trouble if you dare question American exceptionalism
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Llama was a rogue project by the French Meta office - the US folks were getting stuck in their approach. It's EU tech all the way down.
apwell23 1y ago
> They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. This has to be a buzzwordiedest sentence i've ever read. what is 'enterprise utility' and how does mistral have that more than any of the other open models ?
tonyhart7 1y ago
"There is no AI company like Mistral." ok, I almost agree with you on there except last words this is big statement. you know that

spookie 1y ago

Agreed. Also, companies tend to prefer having someone else bound by a contract run their AI services. That way they are safe from scandals, by having a scapegoat, and do not spend time doing something orthogonal to their expertise.

rvnx 1y ago

They built a fork of LLaMA, claimed tech as theirs; the punishment: receive 2B as funding

hirako2000 1y ago
Is there any source you could reference. Really interested. It would not surprise me, why would they build from scratch, every LLM is a "fork" of gpt. Did they not come up with the mixture of expert idea though ?
- bpavuk 1y ago
  and every LLM is a "fork" of Google's Transformers architecture. everything is a "fork", if you give it a serious thought.
hexo 1y ago
isnt this awesome llama trained on pirated works? just checking this iteration
- portaouflop 1y ago
  It’s piracy all the way down

simianwords 1y ago

I mostly only agree with performance due to their collaboration with cerebras - this is a true differentiator. I don't buy that they have an advantage in enterprise, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnership. OpenAI also has opensource models and so do the chinese models.

portaouflop 1y ago
OpenAI has no serious open source software and are Chinese models really a serious alternative for western companies?
- simianwords 1y ago
  Why are they not?
- kaliqt 1y ago
  Yes. It's not like the model can spy on you, so if the model performs well on premise then it will be suitable irrespective of the origin.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    > It's not like the model can spy on you Good luck convincing others of this. I know it's true, you know it's true, but I've met plenty of otherwise reasonable people who just wouldn't listen to any arguments, they already knew better.
    - ajuc 1y ago
      It's theoretically possible that your model will work OK except for code generation for security-relevant applications it will introduce subtle pre-designed bugs. Or if used for screening CVs it will prioritize PRC agents through some keyword in hobbies. Or it could promise a bribe to an office worker when asked about some critical infastructure :) Sending data back could be as simple as responding with embedded image urls that reference external server. You are totally right EU commissioner, Http://chinese.imgdb.com/password/to/eu/grid/is/swordfish/funnycat.png Possibilities are endless.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

> There is no AI company like Mistral Maybe because there shouldn't be?

pembrook 1y ago

All sounds like classic marketing/positioning angles for an indiehacker bootstrapped saas tool. Problem is Mistral needs more than $10K MRR, and isn't going to make it by carving off a small niche when each model costs 10s of Billions to train and run. Europe has no solution to the energy problem long term unfortunately, and is actively trying to make it worse. I'm 100% certain some giant industrial companies in the EU will sign a huge contract with Mistral to give their employees "EU approved" AI. But I'm also 100% certain these employees will just use chatgpt or any of the other frontier models in actual day-to-day reality. Europeans aren't dumb and don't want to be fed inferior slop in the name of abstract emotional vibes.

saubeidl 1y ago
Europe is the only one with a solution to the energy problem long term. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.html https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Oh boy.
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  I think it's Renaissance Fusion (which is still in the EU, but is not Wendelstein 7-X) that has the solution, but it is as stellerator. The only iffy thing are those little ceramic balls full of lead that they talk about letting float inside the lithium, but I suppose they lithium flow might be slow. I don't see how Renaissance Fusion's proposed machine can fail to work.
ZeroGravitas 1y ago
Europe has more nuclear than the US currently (in GW and even more by percentage of grid) and is building more currently and has more in serious planning. From your phrasing I assume you don't believe in renewables so what energy problem solution are you referring to?

fastball 1y ago

Mistral's best models are actually not open-source, and the ones that are open are not particularly competitive with other open-source models these days. Their highest ranked open model on LMArena[1] (mistral-small-2506) ranks below: Qwen3, various DeepSeek models, Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, Gemma, GPT OSS, etc. All those things you listed as part of that story pretty much apply to any open model, so it's kinda a shite list if you want to be differentiated. [1] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text

kergonath 1y ago
That’s true, but not very relevant. Mistral is not in the business of selling their free models. What they are doing for large companies is building datacenters and providing their proprietary models trained on proprietary and confidential internal knowledge and fine-tuned for specific tasks. No sane European organisation would let a Chinese company do this, and American ones are less and less appealing. There is a significant amount of money to be made there and they don’t need to hop on the AGI hype train. They "just" need to provide fast and competent specialised models.
- fastball 1y ago
  It's very relevant if any other EU firm can take open models (regardless of provenance) and fine tune them in the same way. Mistral really needs to be producing at-or-near SOTA models for them to be differentiated at all, and they are not.
  - kergonath 1y ago
    Not even then. You need to compare the end products, which are not the open weight models. I don’t care whether the LLM can have "PhD level thoughts" (lol) or is able to code golf like a Facebook engineer. It needs to be able to do its task (so all the infrastructure around the model matters just as much as the model itself) efficiently (so small models have an advantage). There are billions of weights in general-purpose models that are irrelevant for specialised uses. The way to go is efficient models adapted to their task. It’s exactly the same thing as for industrial robots. Geeks get excited every now and then about humanoid robots, but in the real life we don’t need robots to stand on two legs or our LLM to cite Shakespeare.

nomad_horse 1y ago

> Voxtral outperforms Whisper Can I stop you right here? Whisper is a few years old and it wasn't the best model for a long time. There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. And these models existed before Voxtral.

diggan 1y ago
> There are like 10 models that are smaller and faster and outperform both of them. As someone who is currently relying on Whisper for some things, what models are those exactly? I still haven't found anything that is accurate as Whisper (large), are those models just faster or also as accurate/more accurate?
- artemisart 1y ago
  Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster, here is a leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard
  - diggan 1y ago
    > Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?
    - artemisart 1y ago
      Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    Parakeet isn’t more accurate than whisper large

rvz 1y ago

> There is no AI company like Mistral. The US equivalent of Mistral is Nous Research [0]. Also there would be no Mistral without Llama and it seems like everyone forgot that their LLMs derived from Meta. For every 'Mistral' in the EU, there's 3 or 5 of them in the US. [0] https://nousresearch.com https://nousresearch.com

Neku42 1y ago
Nous Research is NOT equivalent of Mistral. They are not even in the same league. Nous Research is basically LARPing an AI lab compared to Mistral
diggan 1y ago
And everyone forgets that electricity was invented (mostly) by Europeans, but so what? Everything comes from something, doesn't make any place inherently better for continuing to inventing more breakthroughs, it's just people in a place after all.
- simgt 1y ago
  You're going to get yourself in trouble if you dare question American exceptionalism
saubeidl 1y ago
Llama was a rogue project by the French Meta office - the US folks were getting stuck in their approach. It's EU tech all the way down.

apwell23 1y ago

> They’ve built performance, enterprise utility, privacy, sovereignty, open innovation and strategic partnerships into their core story. This has to be a buzzwordiedest sentence i've ever read. what is 'enterprise utility' and how does mistral have that more than any of the other open models ?

tonyhart7 1y ago

"There is no AI company like Mistral." ok, I almost agree with you on there except last words this is big statement. you know that