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Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
- LucidLynx 4mo agoAs an European: 100x YES! I really like the direction and the transparency of Mistral, among those players.
- dtang2718 4mo agoEven as a non European, it's great to see some competition from Europe against the US/Chinese models.
- simonw 4mo ago> BNP Paribas runs Mistral models on-prem for KYC in Belgium, with sensitive data staying within the bank's walls. Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). For European companies in regulated industries, this is a good alternative to relying on US hyperscalers. Mistral leaning into on-prem and European-hosted models is very smart.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- johnbarron 4mo agoLets hope the models can do a better KYC than the humans have been doing..because they are well known. Or is this a case of the humans, now preparing for the excuse it was the AI failure? "BNP Paribas Sentenced for Conspiring to Violate the Trading with the Enemy Act" - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentenced-conspiring-violate-international-emergency-economic-powers-act-and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/bnp-paribas-sentence... "BNP Paribas caught up in French money laundering investigation" - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-up-french-money-laundering-investigation-le-monde-2023-12-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-... "BNP Paribas faces $246m fine in currency scandal" - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40635070 "BNP Paribas caught in a Cypriot money laundering investigation" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/bnp-paribas-caught-in-a-cypriot-money-laundering-investigation_6376471_8.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/12/26/b... In Money Laundering their track record is unmatched: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...
- pavlov 4mo agoWhen the humans have a track record of corruption, it might make sense for a company to seek parallel opinions from a LLM so they can at least flag suspicious human decisions. Assuming BNP Paribas leadership wants to stop the corruption of course.
- johnbarron 4mo agoThey had years to fix it: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-paribas https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...
- bg24 4mo agoAlso Mistral did just the right thing by acquiring Koyeb, to beef up their deployment at scale expertise.
- psychoslave 4mo agoThat's just one side of the story, not following it on details, but their own le chat explained to me that the company was a capitalist succubus starving to build data center in some north European country. Hilarious if you ask me.
- doctorpangloss 4mo agoYeah but why use mistral on premises instead of Qwen?
- simonw 4mo agoOne reason might be that Mistral doesn't have a risk of weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>weird training biases that were required by the Chinese government What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. Just ask the Chinese what they think about LGBTQ+, Japanese, pride parades, Islam and colored minorities. Every nation has its own biases injected in its domestic LLMs at this point. Otherwise they risk getting in trouble for hate speech/disinformation in the jurisdiction where they operate. Same how Google Maps cleverly biases the lines of disputed borders based on where you are viewing it from. Or how Google maps switched 'Gulf of Mexico' to 'Gulf of America' in an instant when the orange man signed the paper. Google won't want to anger the US administration the same way how Mistral won't want to anger France and the EU, so Mistral will have all the EU prime directives injected into its LLMs no matter if they're ludicrous or not. The law is the law whether you agree with it or not. Companies want to survive and will pander to whatever the whims the regime they live under are at the current moment regardless of what is right or wrong. But if I'm using a LLM for personal projects or generating a photorealistic choreographed fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, I don't care what its political biases are, I care if it solves my problem better and cheaper than the competition, and here the Chinese models could end up winning the consumer market, which is why you see Mistral and other EU alternatives focusing exclusive on B-2-B corporate market.
- simonw 4mo ago> What is "weird training biases" to us might not be weird to them and vice versa. I agree. That's why I think European companies might prefer a European model.
- throw14082020 4mo agoRespectfully, I don't think it's "very" smart. It is a fair option given their limited options? Everyone is doing FDE or (customer engineering to be more transparent) because otherwise they will just be seen as markup on token cost. And the Neo-SaaS companies will take the money instead. Who else will buy their AI? and what other options do they have?
- port11 4mo agoYou don’t think it’s smart to get reliable funding this way? From Banking the Cash Cow? Devstral is getting better, it’s the Vibe harness that’s holding it back (I think). I can see how that would drive some business as well. Their chat thingie isn’t very well positioned, but gets results. Could be an euro or two per month, maybe bundled with some more features. It’s not like Mistral has no options, if anything they’re just a bit complacent and not ambitious with their plans.
- lucaspiller 4mo agoThere are enough big banks in Europe that want to use AI, but almost all of them have very terrible software engineering (sorry to anyone who works there), so it's not like they are going to spin up their own cluster on top of open source models. If Mistral can filll this spot (provider and consultant) it could be a big win for them. Then repeat with other similar industries and governments in Europe.
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- neonstatic 4mo agoIt may be very smart for them, but it also shows that the EU has no desire, therefore no chance, to change and lead anything. The only thing it has is regulation.
- oblio 4mo agoThe EU has just poured unfathomable amounts of money into continent wide infrastructure (https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resilience-facility-1_en https://reforms-investments.ec.europa.eu/recovery-and-resili...) - due to COVID, the military - due to Russia, etc. They can't do everything.
- ElFitz 4mo agoIsn’t that the usual EU startup playbook once they give up on the B2C or world-scale SaaS markets? Refocusing on large (European) enterprise B2B and government contracts? It always felt to me this (enterprise B2B) was where European startups went to die.
- sbinnee 4mo agoMy take is that Mistral is not focusing on generating contents such as code, images, or videos. They focus on multi-lingual models, OCR, voice, and others I believe. Their model intro page manifests that although it always confuses me because it's too colorful and there are too many categories, not to mention model names. I hope their decisions will pay off.
- kergonath 4mo agoFrom what I understood they are retiring a lot of the specialised models in favour of the main family.
- petcat 4mo ago> Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app). Maybe my perspective is skewed on what "huge scale" means, but 2 million users? That's like a few hundred megabytes of data? Or a couple GBs if there's a lot of per-user data?
- vnglst 4mo agoMaybe, but using state-of-the-art large language models to solve customer support queries with agentic can quickly use a lot of tokens. What I understood from the talk is that they used agents with limited responsibility and (assumption from me) smaller models, to the make sure the answers were quick, reliable and not too costly.
- hadlock 4mo agoThere are several payments processing companies that are already largely using AI for customer support queries. They still have an escape hatch to a human but at least one of those companies (on the smaller side) is reporting a ~99% success rate, they are down to a handful of human customer service employees now for cases where the customer can't find/produce the transaction ID.
- codebolt 4mo agoUsing Mistral or more SOTA models?
- fidotron 4mo agoEuropean consumer focused businesses do not scale easily the same way US ones do, which is a major contributor to their problems developing tech businesses generally. OTOH such things can be quite defensible, they just rarely become anything like as profitable.
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- Eldodi 4mo agoI was at the event, and was impressed by the attendance, all the leaders from the major european listed companies were there. Also interesting to note the number of partners they invited. Going from Microsoft, Accenture and EY to startups like alpic.ai or lingo.dev . Seems like they are ramping up their M&A game too
- trouve_search 4mo agoOK, I'm 100% rooting for both Mistral and task focused small models. But Mistral has fall really far behind since 2025Q3. It seems they can't get good reasoning models working at even medium context sizes, which is necessary to be at the table right now. Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 are currently best in the small size; Mistral's "small" model has ~4x the parameter count at 120B and isn't even competing with models a quarter its size. Back one year ago with Mistral Small 3.1 they were keeping up, but they've fallen into irrelevancy right now. If Mistral seriously wants to play the on-prem and small task-specific model game, a decent proxy would be to build models that get the r/localLlama crowd excited
- echelon 4mo agoNobody trying to compete with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic should be playing the small models / local models game. Foundation model labs should be building very large reasoning models, then leaving it to the community to distill them down. You can't scale a small model up, but you can scale a small model down. I'm convinced the only way we'll have a seat at the table in the future and avoid total runaway takeoff is if there are very large models within 80% of the capabilities of the frontier models. Tiny RTX models do diddly squat to remain competitive. Build open weights models for running on H200s. I'll spin them up on RunPod or Lambda.
- ahnick 4mo agoI thought distillation meant small models don't have to compete with the big models and can always eventually achieve close parity, but it's just a matter of time to do the distillation? (i.e. how much lag do you want to live with) Am I oversimplifying?
- gertlabs 4mo agoThere is likely a theoretical limit to how much intelligence you can pack into a model of a given size (especially when stretching that over a large input context size). Our evals are pretty complex so we only recently started testing ~30B class models, which are now becoming quite smart (on par with the frontier from 1 year ago). Mistral is far behind, but I'm rooting for them. Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings https://gertlabs.com/rankings
- ogou 4mo agoI've said it before that Mistral is underrated. They are looking at real world use of LLMs and tooling. Bespoke models are very appealing to lots of non-tech centered companies and state agencies. Also, Mistral's actual platform is useful. While others are watching performance leaderboards like this is some eSports stream, they are building real world uses.
- antirez 4mo agoI really want Europe to be part of the AI development and research. And I strongly cheered for Mistral. But they are accumulating too much technological delay. This needs to be fixed, otherwise it will turn into yet another proof we are not able to run large tech with good results. Basically any Chinese lab is doing much better. It's not Mistral that created I don't want to say DeepSeek, but MiMo 2.5, Minimax 2.7, and so forth. There are only weaker and/or larger and slower (no MoE) models. Not good.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act#Penalties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act#Pe... Europe shot itself in the dick with this hastily implemented at the height of mass hysteria bullshit and now no sane company will build anything there. an AI startup in the US or China can be a boy and his computer. in Europe, the boy needs a dozen lawyers. Mistral's sinking into irrelevancy despite the head start they had, the very promising early models they released, and the funding they receive, might very well be the consequence of trying to comply with all that crap.
- djvdq 4mo agoIt's yet another time when EU is killing our own possibilities to build real competition to US or Chinese tech. And yet another time they will be thinking aloud in few year "what happened that we are fully dependent on USA?"
- gspr 4mo agoSo you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?
- xienze 4mo agoThe problem is that statement is a bit too open to interpretation. Ever had Claude piss you off by being stupid and talking in circles? Sounds like manipulation of human behavior!
- tnolet 4mo agoRegardless of the business. Their website design is :chefs-kiss https://mistral.ai/ https://mistral.ai/
- davey48016 4mo agoI love everything about Mistral's branding.
- ilja 4mo agoLe Chat was great, the rebrand to Vibe is meh
- Waterluvian 4mo agoWhat specifically is good about it? I scrolled it on my phone and it seems pretty standard corporate website?
- akkad33 4mo agoIt looks very crowded and the paragraphs are off
- maxdo 4mo agoOh most prominent eu ai company . Without reading an article predict next, will update after : 1. They give up on building competitive models. It’s time to drink wine not to struggle with competition 2. Because of #1 they will talk a bit about something around llms maybe coding agents , and after start talking about sovereignty.
- zuzululu 4mo agoWasn't even aware Mistral was around and I think that just shows you how irrelevant it has become and not a very good sign for EU in general when the best talent are working for American AI companies. I saw Tibo's tweet a while back and it was basically a legitimate complaint about the extreme taxation he faced back in EU (France I think) and its pretty obvious how much of a hinderance top down centralized regulation is to innovation. While I welcome competition and independence, nobody can argue with American innovation and its ability to attract the best of the best. Once it takes seat of the AI reigns there is very little chance for other countries to compete, very much similar to semiconductor field and how only a few select countries have the talent and monopoly over its particular supply chain. It's clear to anyone looking in that whatever EU is doing is not working (not just AI) and will not work as they do not seem flexible or humble enough to steer itself.
- gregorygoc 4mo agoBig tech has remote offices in every major European economy, and they pay well above top 90th percentile of market rate. It basically has a talent sucking effect on the entire economy.
- stephantul 4mo agoI was also at the event and was pretty disappointed. Most of the talks were pretty low on information. I was at the “build” stage, which supposedly was the technical stage, but the talks there didn’t really go into technical specifics. The papyrus talk was awesome though.
- Oras 4mo agoSounds like they don’t have a moat at all. It’s like software consultancy with a data centre. And then the article mentions many customers using these models on prem (so data centre is not really a plus). What’s stopping any country backed startup from fine-tuning small open source models?
- whiplash451 4mo agoMaybe because distilling small models from bigger ones that you control gives you better small models than fine-tuning from bigger models you don't control? (I am not claiming it is the case, but stating this as an assumption)
- vb-8448 4mo agoNo one in Europe will buy from a random startup, the consultancy part is a MUST to do businesses with big corps, banks, finances, insurances, governs, public administration ...
- Oras 4mo agoMistral is a startup that happened to raise 100M. I said in my comment a “country backed startup”, which mistral is
- vb-8448 4mo agoThe "consultancy" is their moat: if there are already in the company they will catch up most of the opportunities despite not having the SOTA model. In Europe procurement cycles are insane, if you are somehow a "trusted vendor" you get a priority line, otherwise you need a lot of political support or ties with some C-level in a company. Moreover, a lot of companies don't want to send their data to external providers(unless it's Microsoft, but it's a different story ...)
- rldjbpin 4mo agotheir moat is where they are based from and that they are making their own models. they have been before the distillation era in the open-weights model. their model's efficacy for the mainstream comparisons may not be up to the task, but they are pivoting to their own lane for it. but the scope beyond the local market, it is yet to be seen.
- rvz 4mo agoWe should be supporting and using local models that allow you to run whatever model you want.
- sbinnee 4mo agoI believe that Mistral team is doing the best they can do. I like the directions they push; open models for various tasks, on-prem has a lot of potential. Sure, I use Claude code mostly for coding. But there are so many tasks other than just coding. Even for coding, eventually, I am certain they will catch up and Vibe becomes tolerable soon.
- gameshot911 4mo agoDoes anyone else always read "Mistrial" instead of "Mistral"? Always think I'm about to read a juicy gossip piece, and let down when it's just a standard update on an AI company. edit A lot of AI company names are really strange, actually. "Claude" is really the best a trillion+ dollar company could come up with? It sounds like the name of a grandpa or something.
- wiether 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_(wind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_(wind)
- OhioMan2943 4mo agoNot to be confused with the fantastic AI Now institute, run by Meredith Whittaker of Signal among others. https://ainowinstitute.org/ https://ainowinstitute.org/ Almost feels like name squatting
- kioleanu 4mo agoI just got an email from them saying that they’re retiring some (most?) of the dedicated models like devstral gradually through August and one should now use the general model. Cost grows exponentially Devstral 2 (devstral-2512 and devstral-latest) → We recommend transitioning to Mistral Medium 3.5 (mistral-medium-3-5 with reasoning_effort set to "high"), a stronger model, priced $1.5/$7.5 per million input/output tokens (change from the previous $0.4/$2).
- phillc73 4mo agoI received the same email, although couldn’t quite figure out which retiring model I was still using, as I thought I’d already transitioned to Mistral-Medium-3.5 for everything. Anyway, after receiving the email, my hope was that it meant they were also planning on releasing some new, improved models in the next months.
- tomaskafka 4mo agoI have been on a lecture from great government IT person, they are evaluating models and are very unhappy about the situation, because they’d love to use Mistral, in some cases it’s the only EU based model they can use … and they know it’s really bad and falling more behind. It is well possible that Mistral can make a profitable business by being bad, but still the only possible model for EU uses. Sad story, sad to witness.
- Imbiss 4mo agoReally hope there is going to be some competition from Europe in the AI Space.
- ramstar3000 4mo agoExcited to see more about their partnership they with Alexa+. In agentic and tool-calling, Mistral’s model architecture excels at the exact structured JSON output Alexa needs to trigger APIs and smart home routines without breaking.
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