12 ms·

Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American

221 points by rzk 6mo ago

eigenspace 6mo ago
IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy. It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
phillc73 6mo ago
I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality. Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Havoc 6mo ago
  There is also risk from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed. Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade… See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
  - notTheLastMan 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - trvz 6mo ago
    Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. It's quicker than taking off the case of your phone and putting on a new one. Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Havoc 6mo ago
      > Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. Thats true right up until you’re working with confidential info in a corporate context. Then it’s a multi month cross discipline cross jurisdiction project not an edit in a config file.
      - mring33621 6mo ago
        L O C A L M O D E L S All data stays on computers that you control. Same API. Localhost.
        mring33621 6mo ago
        Try Mistral-Nemo-2407-12B-Thinking-Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2-Uncensored-HERETIC_Q4_k_m.gguf. This 7.5GB model runs well in llama.cpp on my 2021 Macbook Pro and is good at both coding and business document analysis tasks.
        NekkoDroid 6mo ago
        > Try Mistral-Nemo-2407-12B-Thinking-Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2-Uncensored-HERETIC_Q4_k_m.gguf. Thiss sounds like such a shitpost I initially thought you were joking... but this seems to be a real model???
        mring33621 6mo ago
        It is! I like to try the variations from possibly 'interesting' people. Some of them are good. Others randomly break into gibberish and Chinese poetry(?).
  - tbrownaw 6mo ago
    You are conflating three very different things. The thing with Anthropic and the military was about whether vendors can tell the military what operations it's permitted to do. It has no bearing on the commercial sector, and isn't actually about AI. The thing with NVIDIA cards is a continuation of how we've restricted tech exports for quite a while. You can find old news articles about game consoles being export-restricted over nuclear proliferation concerns. This AI-related one was about whether or not custom AI models are relevant to national security, and whether restricting graphics card sales can have a meaningful impact on them. Any issue with selling chat tokens internationally would be more akin to the recent tariff shenanigans.
- alxlaz 6mo ago
  I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice. Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means. I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
  - dbl000 6mo ago
    That ruthless review prompt seems interesting, would you be willing to share it? I've been trying to have Claude act as a reviewer for me and it feels like it never will disagree.
    - alxlaz 6mo ago
      It's very hard to untangle it from the rest of its context (the prompt is built dynamically, from a lot of parts, some project-specific, some specific to my preferences, some built from interaction history), so I can't really share it. In any case, I don't think it's some specific prompt engineering sorcery I'm doing, it's not like I've spent any real time refining it or experimenting with various magical incantations. It's probably just some model features making it more amenable to the kind of instructions that are relevant in these cases (directness, questioning trade-offs, thoroughness etc.). My chatbot swears equally graphical in review prompts and news summarizing prompts so I'm pretty sure I'm not tickling the machine just right :)
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  Mistral models are definitely good enough. Most people fall for what I call the SOTA Logical Fallacy: whenever there is a 'better model', they think they need to use it, when less-powerful models actually perform the same tasks just as well. (it's an inverse form of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome: every time a new model comes out, people shift their baseline of what is acceptable, despite the fact that a previous baseline was acceptable for the same task) Devstral Small 2 was (and remains) a particularly strong small coding model, even beating larger open weights. Mistral's "problem" is marketing; other providers ship model updates constantly so they remain in the news and seem like they're "beating" the competition. And it works: people get emotionally attached to brands and models, deciding who's better in the court of popular opinion, and that drives their choices (& dollars).
  - tmikaeld 6mo ago
    My biggest issue with Devstral and even their biggest model is that they’re dangerous unless closely directed and reviewed and i mean CLOSELY. Unfortunately mistral models will believe and do anything. See: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v... See some of the test results, it’s horrifying
    - badsectoracula 6mo ago
      FWIW personally i prefer this. When i tried Qwen3.6 and asked it a few questions, while it did respond, it was ADAMANT i should do something else when i really wanted an answer to the question i made. It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific question, not something else. Meanwhile Devstral Small 2 just answers the damn question. I don't want to have to convince my computer to do what i want it to do, i want from it to do what i ask it to.
      - tasuki 6mo ago
        > It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific question, not something else. Don't you think there's usually a good reason for this? Whenever this happened to me, the problem was my ignorance.
aurareturn 6mo ago
In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.
- goodluckchuck 6mo ago
  This phrasing disregards the value of those traits. For example there are very clean and nice public restrooms at my local park, they may be objectively better products and I use them sometimes, but I usually use the one in my house.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- nairboon 6mo ago
  Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
  - CGMthrowaway 6mo ago
    For Mideastern countries, it is paying off. For European countries, remains to be seen
    - lenerdenator 6mo ago
      I can't think of a place on Earth less blessed by "not American" than the Middle East.
pu_pe 6mo ago
Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)
- t-vi 6mo ago
  They have some pretty cool people, though, no reason not to think they'll catch up soon enough.
- baq 6mo ago
  It's a risk, but since they have training expertise they should be able to distill the best open source models to reach at least approximate parity comfortably. Frontier model territory looks increasingly out of reach for anyone without $100B for training and then you have to serve inference to recoup cost, that's an expensive proposition in EU. ...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
- renticulous 6mo ago
  Is this scenario far fetched? Just as Nations pay large companies to build a factory in their country, Nations will similarly pay AI companies to build a national AI model for their own consumption because AI is that beneficial.
- touwer 6mo ago
  Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes
  - pu_pe 6mo ago
    The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train. Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.
recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'. Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones? I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all. What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?
- Iolaum 6mo ago
  I don't know their strategy but I wish they would double up on the open source ecosystem by sharing their innovations like Chinese labs do and use the ones shared as well. I think models in the range of 50B - 250B still have a lot of room to grow and presumably compute to train them should be more accessible than multi-T parameter models. This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.
- enaaem 6mo ago
  Interesting that you mention commodity, because the better AI models become the more fungible they are. AI companies become like web hosting companies renting out server space with good enough open models. It’s not like Excel that runs the world economy because people don’t want to learn anything else.
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves. I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure. I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.
- alkonaut 6mo ago
  > We have a few more picky customers in Germany. Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
  - askonomm 6mo ago
    Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have. Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      >Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_worldwide_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruption_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...
s3tt3mbr1n1 6mo ago
I think it’s important to note that, at least for now, Mistral uses the big American cloud providers for inference [0]. [0] https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors
- ChemSpider 6mo ago
  Yes and they are open about it. That is why they are building their own data centers in Paris and other places.
  - s3tt3mbr1n1 6mo ago
    That’s true, but as their model quality is behind Kimi K2.6 or Deepseek v4, I believe it makes more sense to consume those Chinese models from a European hosting company like Scaleway, than to consume Mistral’s models hosted on US cloud providers, except if you see that Mistral subscription as a kind of investment into Mistral for them to buy infra in the future. That is, if your goal is to “consume” AI on European soil.
    - pixel_popping 6mo ago
      Behind Deepseek R1 by far, they are at least 1 year late in model's performance.
s_dev 6mo ago
I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/ I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month. I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account. Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.
- gitmagic 6mo ago
  You should have asked the bank to do a chargeback of the transactions.
  - mft_ 6mo ago
    I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
    - pyrale 6mo ago
      While chargeback laws are a bit more restrictive in some EU countries, you should always have the option to ask your bank to block future charges, without changing your card.
      - 627467 6mo ago
        A couple of years ago i found out netflix account was stolen, email address changed but card continued to be associated with the account. I couldn't login. Called Amex explained the situation and asked to block future payments. They refused on the basis that I agreed (originally) for netflix to take the subscription fee monthly so I had to contact netflix to solve to do this. Amex. The age where consumers have power over who takes money from them is gone
mark_l_watson 6mo ago
Indirectly I use Mistral daily: I like Proton’s Lumo private chat and that runs on Mistral technology. Something like Lumo is very much good enough to replace search and general information browsing and for me is very practical. What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something. I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.
- jagermo 6mo ago
  I'm looking forward to have a more extensive Kagi API and link that to Lumo. I tried it with Claude and it works pretty well but is too expensive right now. I would love to have more flexibility.
torginus 6mo ago
I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money. These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.
- Lalabadie 6mo ago
  > $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations. Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
    How would that work? What it means for the US AI bubble to burst is that tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar. I don't see how Mistral is or could be sheltered from that.
    - Lalabadie 6mo ago
      SLAs that are valuable to their clients, guarantees and mechanisms to protect them from data exfiltration, and generally long-term contracts with cash-stable orgs like they're currently doing. So long as they're sufficiently liquid at the right time, they don't really need to shelter more. They need to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of their operating expenses.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
        It's extremely hard to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of your operating expenses when all of your customers can see the fire sale happening and know they're now paying you way too much. That's the whole intuition of a general "US AI bubble"; if OpenAI filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, most people expect that would be a crisis for Anthropic and Gemini rather than a windfall opportunity to pick up their compute for cheap.
jubilanti 6mo ago
> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it. Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?
- kgwgk 6mo ago
  > in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris > actually in the 2nd The mixup is easily explainable: machines write numbers in binary notation!
thinkindie 6mo ago
I hope Mistral will not fall for the Forbes kiss of death.
shevy-java 6mo ago
While that may be slightly better than being dependent on Washington, I still don't like it. Everyone is now AI-crazy. If you go to clown-channels such as the war industry or the crazy Palantir guy who wants to ruin everyone, you see that they dream of AI controlled mega-drones wiping out cities. That's the next "evolutionary" step; you can already see video footage of how much drones changed war. And these guys all push for more, more, more. I now understand why Trump keeps on making so many wrong decisions - he is being showed war-videos and sells it as a promotional agent. That's his main job; for anything else other than promo he has no competence.
lenerdenator 6mo ago
That's... not that much money. Anthropic's supposedly worth $380 billion.
- niklassheth 6mo ago
  And on secondary markets shares are trading for at least twice that...
enaaem 6mo ago
It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.
- bachmeier 6mo ago
  I expect AI to become more like the news, where every country has their own news services, rather than the global monopoly Sam Altman had envisioned. We even see it with Meta, a company that doesn't sell AI. They'd rather build their own models than let one or a few companies have that much leverage over them. This is why it's unlikely open models will disappear. That's the only thing that prevents a global AI oligopoly.
- anon291 6mo ago
  Has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with marginal cost. Software and hardware is winner takes all because the marginal cost of producing a copy of a software product is near zero, and the marginal cost of producing a hardware chip is also very low. This is not true of AI models. Both inference and training have high marginal costs, since the compute demand is intense.
resheku 6mo ago
If I could I would down vote this title, as it’s applying that only Americans have a right to be good
tom1337890 6mo ago
I follow Mistral AI and especially liked their voice Model voxtral, which is supposed to be better than whisper. So while the LLM can maybe not compete, they do compete in voice. [1] I think these kind of special use cases matter a lot for people who want to build special software. Voice for example is not yet that uniformly accessible as LLMs. So once you chose one provider you're more tighty coupled. Plus, handling voice is more sensitive by nature, so guess at least for European companies building something with voice, Mistral is the go-to company now. Also, running voxtral yourself is not that straight forward as of now, so relying on their inference makes sense. 1: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
AI is now at the forefront of cyber weapons development, so it's basically a munition, like encryption was at the turn of the century. Countries will need models they can vet, developed by allies (the US now basically has no allies), and run in local datacenters. The US had a significant advantage in physical arms due to its massive military industrial complex. But with AI, it's letting private industry do all the heavy lifting while other countries rely more on government support. The US may have the best AI weapons, but it won't be able to sell them to anyone, so it won't make money needed to keep paying for the AI weapons. Meanwhile the rest of the West will rely on Mistral for its cyber weapons.
neves 6mo ago
It's very sad that the rest of the world is seeing USA as a non trustable partner. It always has been an inspiration and now using their services as a liability.
logicallee 6mo ago
Not being American is very important to me and my partner. For my next job, I'm looking exclusively at companies headquartered in the PRC. My partner and I formally registered ourselves as foreign agents of the PRC. While we did that, the NSA actually took down the entire DOJ filing site for this just to further obstruct us, in the end we had to register with the Attorney General by email, persuant to U.S. law.[1] Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote: "At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”" This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts. [1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.html https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht... [2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agency-internal-chatroom-transgender-surgeries-polyamory https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...
Eldodi 6mo ago
It will be interesting if Mistral succeeds to keep up with US and Chinese labs in terms of Models, or if they just become an integration company of chinese OSS frontier labs, like more and more of their competitors
raffael_de 6mo ago
Any recent news or data on NSA running a MITM at DE-CIX?
Zopieux 6mo ago
>“Poulantir” going public on the NYSE. We don't have money, but we have the best puns. -- The French, probably
octocop 6mo ago
Mistral brought Mixture of Experts and other really good innovations
PeterStuer 6mo ago
And yet there is heavy involvement of US capital and technology in Mistral. Not just hardware and finance, but also board seats.
avrionov 6mo ago
The word empire is used for anything these days. Mistral is successful, but their market cap $14B is less than than revenue of OpenAI or Anthropic. They may not have the scale to compete with the American and the Chinese companies.
- pb7 6mo ago
  $14B "empire" next to a trillion dollar OpenAI, trillion dollar Anthropic, trillion dollar DeepMind... this is a massive failure, not an empire. It is truly baffling how low expectations are for European tech.
eolgun 6mo ago
[dead]
sylware 6mo ago
Is it possible for the common people to access mistral? And that without being gated by a 'whatng cartel' web engine?
- qznc 6mo ago
  I use Le Chat free tier. Not as good as ChatGPT free tier but sufficient for 90% of my uses. I tried Mistral Vibe (Claude Code equivalent) free tier for a week. I hit web_search limits but not limits for devstral-2. For a working mode where you watch it closely (same way I use Claude Code), it is fine.
  - sylware 6mo ago
    Can I use Mistral Vibe without a whatng cartel web engine? Namely, classic web (noscript/basic (x)html), or a dynamic web API with some public tokens? (using a set of CURL commands). If there is a requirement of account creation (often required to generate web API tokens), can I do that using the classic web (noscript/basic (x)html)? And if so, if the account creation does require an email address, do they support self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS, namely email addresses with IPv[46] literals?
    - duskwuff 6mo ago
      "Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer." If you go out of your way to make your computing environment weird, don't be surprised when things don't work for you.
      - sylware 6mo ago
        Oh boy... it is the other way around. Those "computing environments" are filthy toxic, they should not even exist and they broke what was rather sane. With their "computing environments', you get planned obsolescence (they call that 'innovation', lol), dev and vendor lock-in using non pertinent complexity, etc. There is nothing more sane than trying to fix that. This is a complex matter, and those guys are pure evil with their 'computing environments", won't going to be easy, I guess you may be one of them, or a one of their brain washed soldiers, or here an AI bot. Because, many fresh and young guys in the field are just getting scre... as f... with their washed super clean brain (in academics, those "teachers" who would not be even there without those toxic 'computing environments', yep, this toxicity is their bread and butter, it is a problem). A lot of money is being channelled in those scams, I guess this is their primary reason to force them onto people. Once you get a simple, but good enough to the job, and stable in time alternative technical apparatus, toxicity levels go back to something bearable, namely their absurd and grotestely complex for no good reasons "computing environment" is just, gone. That said, it is more about control than money, because "big money" follows "control" almost mechanically. Those guys look like near real mafias (often with big investment funds behind them, like vanguard and blackrock for instance). I just discovered, that here, they literaly dictate their will to our presidents and prime ministers which they used as carpets (they are getting clean brain washed or maybe they are deep into some '$$$' schemes). The rabbit hole seems to be going reaaaally deep. So for mistral, where are the public tokens to be used with a properly documented web API? I could generate some tokens, using a mistral account, which I should be able to create with a classic web browser (noscript/basic (x)html), and if required with my self-hosted email server on IPv6 without DNS, namely email addresses with ipv6 literals which are stronger than SPF since you drop all emails which ipv6 addresses from the email addresses of the envelop and/or the header do not match. It could be some documented simple network protocol to interact with their inference service. And we all know, those protocols should be stripped to the simplest as possible, because with an online service most of the work does happen in keeping it safe and available, and their 'computing environment' complexity is making that mechanically a pain, this is common sense. As I said, if you are one of them, namely not being one of their brain washed soldiers aka one of the evil ones, this is pointless to argument anything.
guluarte 6mo ago
or because it one of first companies to release an OSS model that somewhat useful

221 points by rzk 6mo ago

IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy. It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.

phillc73 6mo ago

I am a Mistral Le Chat Pro subscriber. I specifically chose to test their offerings because they are European. I don't have the necessary local hardware to run really big models, therefore need to choose a cloud provider if I want LLM action. I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can. After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality. Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.

Havoc 6mo ago
There is also risk from a US regulatory side as recent drama around antrophic showed. Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade… See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
- notTheLastMan 6mo ago
  [dead]
- trvz 6mo ago
  Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. It's quicker than taking off the case of your phone and putting on a new one. Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Havoc 6mo ago
    > Changing your LLM inference provider is the easiest switch in technology I can think of. Thats true right up until you’re working with confidential info in a corporate context. Then it’s a multi month cross discipline cross jurisdiction project not an edit in a config file.
    - mring33621 6mo ago
      L O C A L M O D E L S All data stays on computers that you control. Same API. Localhost.
      - mring33621 6mo ago
        Try Mistral-Nemo-2407-12B-Thinking-Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2-Uncensored-HERETIC_Q4_k_m.gguf. This 7.5GB model runs well in llama.cpp on my 2021 Macbook Pro and is good at both coding and business document analysis tasks.
        NekkoDroid 6mo ago
        > Try Mistral-Nemo-2407-12B-Thinking-Claude-Gemini-GPT5.2-Uncensored-HERETIC_Q4_k_m.gguf. Thiss sounds like such a shitpost I initially thought you were joking... but this seems to be a real model???
        mring33621 6mo ago
        It is! I like to try the variations from possibly 'interesting' people. Some of them are good. Others randomly break into gibberish and Chinese poetry(?).
- tbrownaw 6mo ago
  You are conflating three very different things. The thing with Anthropic and the military was about whether vendors can tell the military what operations it's permitted to do. It has no bearing on the commercial sector, and isn't actually about AI. The thing with NVIDIA cards is a continuation of how we've restricted tech exports for quite a while. You can find old news articles about game consoles being export-restricted over nuclear proliferation concerns. This AI-related one was about whether or not custom AI models are relevant to national security, and whether restricting graphics card sales can have a meaningful impact on them. Any issue with selling chat tokens internationally would be more akin to the recent tariff shenanigans.
alxlaz 6mo ago
I use their API for several models, both for personal and professional use. I think their approach (smaller, specialised models that are well-adapted for specific tasks) is a very good fit for how I work. And even the more general-purpose ones, like the chat model, just... refreshingly good in a lot of ways. My "ruthless review" prompt, which I use for, well, ruthless, guided reviews of early technical drafts, has good technical results for early reviews and holy crap is it ruthless and does it know how to swear. By the time Claude or ChatGPT are done being honest about how right I am to push back and gently circling back, Mistral's large model has sent me back to the drawing board twice. Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means. I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
- dbl000 6mo ago
  That ruthless review prompt seems interesting, would you be willing to share it? I've been trying to have Claude act as a reviewer for me and it feels like it never will disagree.
  - alxlaz 6mo ago
    It's very hard to untangle it from the rest of its context (the prompt is built dynamically, from a lot of parts, some project-specific, some specific to my preferences, some built from interaction history), so I can't really share it. In any case, I don't think it's some specific prompt engineering sorcery I'm doing, it's not like I've spent any real time refining it or experimenting with various magical incantations. It's probably just some model features making it more amenable to the kind of instructions that are relevant in these cases (directness, questioning trade-offs, thoroughness etc.). My chatbot swears equally graphical in review prompts and news summarizing prompts so I'm pretty sure I'm not tickling the machine just right :)
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
Mistral models are definitely good enough. Most people fall for what I call the SOTA Logical Fallacy: whenever there is a 'better model', they think they need to use it, when less-powerful models actually perform the same tasks just as well. (it's an inverse form of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome: every time a new model comes out, people shift their baseline of what is acceptable, despite the fact that a previous baseline was acceptable for the same task) Devstral Small 2 was (and remains) a particularly strong small coding model, even beating larger open weights. Mistral's "problem" is marketing; other providers ship model updates constantly so they remain in the news and seem like they're "beating" the competition. And it works: people get emotionally attached to brands and models, deciding who's better in the court of popular opinion, and that drives their choices (& dollars).
- tmikaeld 6mo ago
  My biggest issue with Devstral and even their biggest model is that they’re dangerous unless closely directed and reviewed and i mean CLOSELY. Unfortunately mistral models will believe and do anything. See: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v... See some of the test results, it’s horrifying
  - badsectoracula 6mo ago
    FWIW personally i prefer this. When i tried Qwen3.6 and asked it a few questions, while it did respond, it was ADAMANT i should do something else when i really wanted an answer to the question i made. It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific question, not something else. Meanwhile Devstral Small 2 just answers the damn question. I don't want to have to convince my computer to do what i want it to do, i want from it to do what i ask it to.
    - tasuki 6mo ago
      > It felt like when you search something and a stackoverflow answer about what you search for comes up and the most upvoted answer is about using/doing something else - when you want a specific answer to that specific question, not something else. Don't you think there's usually a good reason for this? Whenever this happened to me, the problem was my ignorance.

aurareturn 6mo ago

In my opinion, being "Not American" or "Not Chinese" is not a good business model long-term. At some point, businesses will choose the option that provides the most value. I'm very skeptical that Mistral will survive long-term. Edit: I hear the commenters to this post. However, Mistral still relies on American chips. If there is truly a divorce between Europe and the US such that relying OpenAI or Anthropic is not an option, neither will relying on Nvidia and likely the thousands of smaller hardware and software suppliers that make Mistral work. That's why I don't think it's realistic to say that Europeans can't rely on OpenAI/Anthropic and that Mistral is free from American reliance. If you want true independence, you have to rebuild every single layer like what China is doing. That's hard and expensive.

goodluckchuck 6mo ago
This phrasing disregards the value of those traits. For example there are very clean and nice public restrooms at my local park, they may be objectively better products and I use them sometimes, but I usually use the one in my house.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nairboon 6mo ago
Recent political events have demonstrated that "Not American" is a very valuable strategic attribute.
- CGMthrowaway 6mo ago
  For Mideastern countries, it is paying off. For European countries, remains to be seen
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    I can't think of a place on Earth less blessed by "not American" than the Middle East.

pu_pe 6mo ago

Mistral has a very difficult scenario to navigate. Training models in Europe is difficult and expensive because of regulations and energy prices. Their own open models are lagging behind the Chinese ones. That means eventually they will turn into an inference-only enterprise running mostly Chinese open models, at which point any other European player could compete (Hetzner, OVHCloud, etc.)

t-vi 6mo ago
They have some pretty cool people, though, no reason not to think they'll catch up soon enough.
baq 6mo ago
It's a risk, but since they have training expertise they should be able to distill the best open source models to reach at least approximate parity comfortably. Frontier model territory looks increasingly out of reach for anyone without $100B for training and then you have to serve inference to recoup cost, that's an expensive proposition in EU. ...OTOH the cost of not sponsoring this in Europe may be complete technological obsolescence. Rock and a hard place situation.
renticulous 6mo ago
Is this scenario far fetched? Just as Nations pay large companies to build a factory in their country, Nations will similarly pay AI companies to build a national AI model for their own consumption because AI is that beneficial.
touwer 6mo ago
Well, they can train in any country they want. It's the inference and data placement that counts for legal purposes
- pu_pe 6mo ago
  The regulatory concerns are worldwide: the GDPR has restrictions about the territorial location of data, so you cannot move data anywhere else other than EU or "adequate" countries (in practice, the US). Since the real gold is in using data that users submitted to you (ie, GDPR protected), they are kind of stuck in regards to where they can train. Mistral's stack already heavily relies on American cloud providers and they have tons of American investors, so its sovereignty angle is dubious anyway.

recsv-heredoc 6mo ago

LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'. Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones? I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all. What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?

Iolaum 6mo ago
I don't know their strategy but I wish they would double up on the open source ecosystem by sharing their innovations like Chinese labs do and use the ones shared as well. I think models in the range of 50B - 250B still have a lot of room to grow and presumably compute to train them should be more accessible than multi-T parameter models. This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.
enaaem 6mo ago
Interesting that you mention commodity, because the better AI models become the more fungible they are. AI companies become like web hosting companies renting out server space with good enough open models. It’s not like Excel that runs the world economy because people don’t want to learn anything else.

jillesvangurp 6mo ago

These are just signs of this market maturing. For a lot of business customers, EU based hosting is not optional. That includes models. Routing requests via API endpoints in the US is not really acceptable. And anything involving privacy sensitive data of course needs to be handled properly. Sam Altman pinky swearing to be nice doesn't quite cut it in terms of hard guarantees. EU based legal entities and strong compliance with local laws with some hard SLAs and contractual guarantees is not going to be optional for liability reasons. Provenance of models, their training data, and exact ways they have been instructed to act are also not just nice to haves. I expect non EU jurisdictions are eventually going to be similarly picky about their AI suppliers and I expect all the big tech providers to adapt to local markets just like they did with cloud infrastructure. I don't have much experience with Mistral yet. But I may need to get my hands dirty to be able to sell this to some of our customers. We have a few more picky customers in Germany.

alkonaut 6mo ago
> We have a few more picky customers in Germany. Describe making business in Europe with one evergreen sentence
- askonomm 6mo ago
  Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law, as opposed to the U.S where breaking the law is just a matter of paying some $ to the grifter in chief? I always find it funny when Europeans being proactive about that sort of stuff is somehow a bad thing from Americans point of view. Like wanting decent human rights and not having to bend over to megacorps is something we should not have. Though, if the Americans in question just want to do their grifting in EU, it makes sense why they are upset at that, I guess, because it limits their grifting opportunities.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >Because companies here actively want to avoid breaking the law Haha, yeah sure. What other fairy tales you gonna tells us next? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_worldwide_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#2005_and_continuing:_w... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmalat_bankruptcy_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus#Bribery_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafarge_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_Group#Money_laundering_cas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruption_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings#Corruptio...

s3tt3mbr1n1 6mo ago

I think it’s important to note that, at least for now, Mistral uses the big American cloud providers for inference [0]. [0] https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors

ChemSpider 6mo ago
Yes and they are open about it. That is why they are building their own data centers in Paris and other places.
- s3tt3mbr1n1 6mo ago
  That’s true, but as their model quality is behind Kimi K2.6 or Deepseek v4, I believe it makes more sense to consume those Chinese models from a European hosting company like Scaleway, than to consume Mistral’s models hosted on US cloud providers, except if you see that Mistral subscription as a kind of investment into Mistral for them to buy infra in the future. That is, if your goal is to “consume” AI on European soil.
  - pixel_popping 6mo ago
    Behind Deepseek R1 by far, they are at least 1 year late in model's performance.

s_dev 6mo ago

I support the US->EU movement but I've been put off Mistral's Le Chat. https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/ I subscribed (and paid) for a year of Pro. They gave me 1 month on the basis that a payment was missed on the second month. They simply stopped providing Pro and continued to take a monthly subscription for the next year (Stripe allows subscriptions to be fixed in the background). I must have changed cards that specific month. I spoke to customer service who told me any sort of refund or complementary tokens was impossible and that I should have been paying closer attention to how much money I was giving them. So I shut down the subscription and now pay Claude $200 a month and deleted the account. Genuinely was shocked at poor customer service can be with EU services sometimes compared to US ones. That said I will keep trying and exploring EU options, hopefully a new EU LLM giant emerges in the next few years.

gitmagic 6mo ago
You should have asked the bank to do a chargeback of the transactions.
- mft_ 6mo ago
  I don’t know whether there’s a US vs. Europe difference on this, but I failed to get my (European) bank to do this a while back when Tesla continued to take money for a subscription after I’d given the car back. (I had to kill that credit card and write the small amount off in the end.)
  - pyrale 6mo ago
    While chargeback laws are a bit more restrictive in some EU countries, you should always have the option to ask your bank to block future charges, without changing your card.
    - 627467 6mo ago
      A couple of years ago i found out netflix account was stolen, email address changed but card continued to be associated with the account. I couldn't login. Called Amex explained the situation and asked to block future payments. They refused on the basis that I agreed (originally) for netflix to take the subscription fee monthly so I had to contact netflix to solve to do this. Amex. The age where consumers have power over who takes money from them is gone

mark_l_watson 6mo ago

Indirectly I use Mistral daily: I like Proton’s Lumo private chat and that runs on Mistral technology. Something like Lumo is very much good enough to replace search and general information browsing and for me is very practical. What is not so practical is my paying for Gemini Ultra, which has some practicality but is something I pay for because it is fun using strong AIs like Claude and Gemini Pro in AntiGravity. It feels funny to admit paying a lot of money just to have fun with something. I wish Mistral good luck, and I like their deployed forward engineers approach to business. Seems practical.

jagermo 6mo ago
I'm looking forward to have a more extensive Kagi API and link that to Lumo. I tried it with Claude and it works pretty well but is too expensive right now. I would love to have more flexibility.

torginus 6mo ago

I feel like there's a gross mischaracterization here - $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money. These guys have built a fully built-out AI company with a range of models and applications.

Lalabadie 6mo ago
> $14B in AI terms is like 'second-best VSCode fork' tier money Yep, and the comparison relies on key people believing the valuations. Lots of mature companies will want their providers to be reasonably sheltered from the fallout of a coming US AI bubble burst.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  How would that work? What it means for the US AI bubble to burst is that tremendous amounts of inference capacity become open for pennies on the dollar. I don't see how Mistral is or could be sheltered from that.
  - Lalabadie 6mo ago
    SLAs that are valuable to their clients, guarantees and mechanisms to protect them from data exfiltration, and generally long-term contracts with cash-stable orgs like they're currently doing. So long as they're sufficiently liquid at the right time, they don't really need to shelter more. They need to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of their operating expenses.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      It's extremely hard to plan for a fire sale on the bulk of your operating expenses when all of your customers can see the fire sale happening and know they're now paying you way too much. That's the whole intuition of a general "US AI bubble"; if OpenAI filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, most people expect that would be a crisis for Anthropic and Gemini rather than a windfall opportunity to pick up their compute for cheap.

jubilanti 6mo ago

> from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris Couldn't continue reading after this ignorance. The 10th is dominated by the two major train stations and warehouses. Notorious for petty crime and giving arriving tourists "Paris Syndrome" because of the disappointment. It is the least trendy arrondissement in Paris. It is central, but that's about it. Edit: Looked it up and Mistral's offices are actually in the 2nd, about 500 meters from the Louvre. A very trendy area indeed. Is this a human or AI hallucination? What else in this article is wrong?

kgwgk 6mo ago
> in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris > actually in the 2nd The mixup is easily explainable: machines write numbers in binary notation!

thinkindie 6mo ago

I hope Mistral will not fall for the Forbes kiss of death.

shevy-java 6mo ago

While that may be slightly better than being dependent on Washington, I still don't like it. Everyone is now AI-crazy. If you go to clown-channels such as the war industry or the crazy Palantir guy who wants to ruin everyone, you see that they dream of AI controlled mega-drones wiping out cities. That's the next "evolutionary" step; you can already see video footage of how much drones changed war. And these guys all push for more, more, more. I now understand why Trump keeps on making so many wrong decisions - he is being showed war-videos and sells it as a promotional agent. That's his main job; for anything else other than promo he has no competence.

lenerdenator 6mo ago

That's... not that much money. Anthropic's supposedly worth $380 billion.

niklassheth 6mo ago
And on secondary markets shares are trading for at least twice that...

enaaem 6mo ago

It seems that the winner takes all market for tech will eventually go away. Countries and regions want to develop their own good enough solutions that is not dependent on America.

bachmeier 6mo ago
I expect AI to become more like the news, where every country has their own news services, rather than the global monopoly Sam Altman had envisioned. We even see it with Meta, a company that doesn't sell AI. They'd rather build their own models than let one or a few companies have that much leverage over them. This is why it's unlikely open models will disappear. That's the only thing that prevents a global AI oligopoly.
anon291 6mo ago
Has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with marginal cost. Software and hardware is winner takes all because the marginal cost of producing a copy of a software product is near zero, and the marginal cost of producing a hardware chip is also very low. This is not true of AI models. Both inference and training have high marginal costs, since the compute demand is intense.

resheku 6mo ago

If I could I would down vote this title, as it’s applying that only Americans have a right to be good

tom1337890 6mo ago

I follow Mistral AI and especially liked their voice Model voxtral, which is supposed to be better than whisper. So while the LLM can maybe not compete, they do compete in voice. [1] I think these kind of special use cases matter a lot for people who want to build special software. Voice for example is not yet that uniformly accessible as LLMs. So once you chose one provider you're more tighty coupled. Plus, handling voice is more sensitive by nature, so guess at least for European companies building something with voice, Mistral is the go-to company now. Also, running voxtral yourself is not that straight forward as of now, so relying on their inference makes sense. 1: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago

AI is now at the forefront of cyber weapons development, so it's basically a munition, like encryption was at the turn of the century. Countries will need models they can vet, developed by allies (the US now basically has no allies), and run in local datacenters. The US had a significant advantage in physical arms due to its massive military industrial complex. But with AI, it's letting private industry do all the heavy lifting while other countries rely more on government support. The US may have the best AI weapons, but it won't be able to sell them to anyone, so it won't make money needed to keep paying for the AI weapons. Meanwhile the rest of the West will rely on Mistral for its cyber weapons.

neves 6mo ago

It's very sad that the rest of the world is seeing USA as a non trustable partner. It always has been an inspiration and now using their services as a liability.

logicallee 6mo ago

Not being American is very important to me and my partner. For my next job, I'm looking exclusively at companies headquartered in the PRC. My partner and I formally registered ourselves as foreign agents of the PRC. While we did that, the NSA actually took down the entire DOJ filing site for this just to further obstruct us, in the end we had to register with the Attorney General by email, persuant to U.S. law.[1] Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote: "At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”" This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts. [1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.html https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht... [2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agency-internal-chatroom-transgender-surgeries-polyamory https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...

Eldodi 6mo ago

It will be interesting if Mistral succeeds to keep up with US and Chinese labs in terms of Models, or if they just become an integration company of chinese OSS frontier labs, like more and more of their competitors

raffael_de 6mo ago

Any recent news or data on NSA running a MITM at DE-CIX?

Zopieux 6mo ago

>“Poulantir” going public on the NYSE. We don't have money, but we have the best puns. -- The French, probably

octocop 6mo ago

Mistral brought Mixture of Experts and other really good innovations

PeterStuer 6mo ago

And yet there is heavy involvement of US capital and technology in Mistral. Not just hardware and finance, but also board seats.

avrionov 6mo ago

The word empire is used for anything these days. Mistral is successful, but their market cap $14B is less than than revenue of OpenAI or Anthropic. They may not have the scale to compete with the American and the Chinese companies.

pb7 6mo ago
$14B "empire" next to a trillion dollar OpenAI, trillion dollar Anthropic, trillion dollar DeepMind... this is a massive failure, not an empire. It is truly baffling how low expectations are for European tech.

eolgun 6mo ago

[dead]

sylware 6mo ago

Is it possible for the common people to access mistral? And that without being gated by a 'whatng cartel' web engine?

qznc 6mo ago
I use Le Chat free tier. Not as good as ChatGPT free tier but sufficient for 90% of my uses. I tried Mistral Vibe (Claude Code equivalent) free tier for a week. I hit web_search limits but not limits for devstral-2. For a working mode where you watch it closely (same way I use Claude Code), it is fine.
- sylware 6mo ago
  Can I use Mistral Vibe without a whatng cartel web engine? Namely, classic web (noscript/basic (x)html), or a dynamic web API with some public tokens? (using a set of CURL commands). If there is a requirement of account creation (often required to generate web API tokens), can I do that using the classic web (noscript/basic (x)html)? And if so, if the account creation does require an email address, do they support self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS, namely email addresses with IPv[46] literals?
  - duskwuff 6mo ago
    "Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer." If you go out of your way to make your computing environment weird, don't be surprised when things don't work for you.
    - sylware 6mo ago
      Oh boy... it is the other way around. Those "computing environments" are filthy toxic, they should not even exist and they broke what was rather sane. With their "computing environments', you get planned obsolescence (they call that 'innovation', lol), dev and vendor lock-in using non pertinent complexity, etc. There is nothing more sane than trying to fix that. This is a complex matter, and those guys are pure evil with their 'computing environments", won't going to be easy, I guess you may be one of them, or a one of their brain washed soldiers, or here an AI bot. Because, many fresh and young guys in the field are just getting scre... as f... with their washed super clean brain (in academics, those "teachers" who would not be even there without those toxic 'computing environments', yep, this toxicity is their bread and butter, it is a problem). A lot of money is being channelled in those scams, I guess this is their primary reason to force them onto people. Once you get a simple, but good enough to the job, and stable in time alternative technical apparatus, toxicity levels go back to something bearable, namely their absurd and grotestely complex for no good reasons "computing environment" is just, gone. That said, it is more about control than money, because "big money" follows "control" almost mechanically. Those guys look like near real mafias (often with big investment funds behind them, like vanguard and blackrock for instance). I just discovered, that here, they literaly dictate their will to our presidents and prime ministers which they used as carpets (they are getting clean brain washed or maybe they are deep into some '$$$' schemes). The rabbit hole seems to be going reaaaally deep. So for mistral, where are the public tokens to be used with a properly documented web API? I could generate some tokens, using a mistral account, which I should be able to create with a classic web browser (noscript/basic (x)html), and if required with my self-hosted email server on IPv6 without DNS, namely email addresses with ipv6 literals which are stronger than SPF since you drop all emails which ipv6 addresses from the email addresses of the envelop and/or the header do not match. It could be some documented simple network protocol to interact with their inference service. And we all know, those protocols should be stripped to the simplest as possible, because with an online service most of the work does happen in keeping it safe and available, and their 'computing environment' complexity is making that mechanically a pain, this is common sense. As I said, if you are one of them, namely not being one of their brain washed soldiers aka one of the evil ones, this is pointless to argument anything.

guluarte 6mo ago

or because it one of first companies to release an OSS model that somewhat useful