4 ms·

agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their mo

by baq 5mo ago

agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.

djvdq 5mo ago
Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek
- KronisLV 5mo ago
  I tried it out on some dev tasks with their Mistral Vibe subscription, and the performance was pretty okay (okay, not great), both in regards to development and speed. Worse than Anthropic's models I'm used to but at 20 EUR per month it wasn't a bad deal - except that the 200k context size would more or less be a deal breaker in many cases.
  - eisa01 5mo ago
    Where do you sign up for that subscription? I wanted to try out Mistral, but I fail to find anything like that even after creating an account
    - djvdq 5mo ago
      Maybe on their pricing page? https://mistral.ai/pricing/ https://mistral.ai/pricing/
    - KronisLV 5mo ago
      The other comment already mentioned that you get their subscription: https://mistral.ai/pricing/ https://mistral.ai/pricing/ they do say that you can try out their coding agent for free, but personally the Pro tier is pretty affordable too to try out for a month. Then you can install their coding harness, I personally used the Python + uv option: https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ if you don't have uv yet, you might have to install it too: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ though I already use it for other projects. Oh and if on Windows, you probably want to do all of the installation inside of WSL, just so that file paths are the *nix variety, I've had issues otherwise with pretty much every coding harness, like OpenCode as well (across multiple models). After that, you need an API key for your subscription, you can generate and copy it here: https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli that's also where you see the quota, though it seems to NOT refresh instantly, but more or less a few times a day. Either way, happy coding!
- bermudi 5mo ago
  Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligence
amunozo 5mo ago
DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.
- gregorygoc 5mo ago
  Because they distill
  - ctrlkctrls 5mo ago
    it doesn't matter the reason. This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. Mistral looks like it's fading away to irrelevance unless they can play alongside the similar sized models, or have some unique advantage other than being in Europe, for Europe. I was really excited for them back when they were startup that had the biggest European venture round ever. This space will have a few winners, and many losers. Google, plus either Anthropic or OpenAI most likely. Big models will see breakthroughs in inference performance/cost fall precipitously and small models will only exist on devices (Pixels and iPhones, cars, watches, bluetooth speakers, etc)
    - gregorygoc 5mo ago
      It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I am just pointing out why it’s hard to catch up to scaling laws given the European economic (capital) and political (US would be upset if they found out Europeans distill) constraints. China is only bound by economic constraints.
      - KronisLV 5mo ago
        With the insight in your comment and this bit from the above one: > This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. It seems like the EU should have paid China for the distillation datasets, esp. since Mistral isn’t even a governmental org.
    - sofixa 5mo ago
      > This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably. For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that. And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.

by baq 5mo ago

djvdq 5mo ago

Also, new Medium 3.5 is far more expensive than previous Mistral models, and much more expensive than e.g. Deepseek

KronisLV 5mo ago
I tried it out on some dev tasks with their Mistral Vibe subscription, and the performance was pretty okay (okay, not great), both in regards to development and speed. Worse than Anthropic's models I'm used to but at 20 EUR per month it wasn't a bad deal - except that the 200k context size would more or less be a deal breaker in many cases.
- eisa01 5mo ago
  Where do you sign up for that subscription? I wanted to try out Mistral, but I fail to find anything like that even after creating an account
  - djvdq 5mo ago
    Maybe on their pricing page? https://mistral.ai/pricing/ https://mistral.ai/pricing/
  - KronisLV 5mo ago
    The other comment already mentioned that you get their subscription: https://mistral.ai/pricing/ https://mistral.ai/pricing/ they do say that you can try out their coding agent for free, but personally the Pro tier is pretty affordable too to try out for a month. Then you can install their coding harness, I personally used the Python + uv option: https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ if you don't have uv yet, you might have to install it too: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ though I already use it for other projects. Oh and if on Windows, you probably want to do all of the installation inside of WSL, just so that file paths are the *nix variety, I've had issues otherwise with pretty much every coding harness, like OpenCode as well (across multiple models). After that, you need an API key for your subscription, you can generate and copy it here: https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli that's also where you see the quota, though it seems to NOT refresh instantly, but more or less a few times a day. Either way, happy coding!
bermudi 5mo ago
Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligence

amunozo 5mo ago

DeepSeek is both cheaper and better than Mistral.

gregorygoc 5mo ago
Because they distill
- ctrlkctrls 5mo ago
  it doesn't matter the reason. This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. Mistral looks like it's fading away to irrelevance unless they can play alongside the similar sized models, or have some unique advantage other than being in Europe, for Europe. I was really excited for them back when they were startup that had the biggest European venture round ever. This space will have a few winners, and many losers. Google, plus either Anthropic or OpenAI most likely. Big models will see breakthroughs in inference performance/cost fall precipitously and small models will only exist on devices (Pixels and iPhones, cars, watches, bluetooth speakers, etc)
  - gregorygoc 5mo ago
    It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I am just pointing out why it’s hard to catch up to scaling laws given the European economic (capital) and political (US would be upset if they found out Europeans distill) constraints. China is only bound by economic constraints.
    - KronisLV 5mo ago
      With the insight in your comment and this bit from the above one: > This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. It seems like the EU should have paid China for the distillation datasets, esp. since Mistral isn’t even a governmental org.
  - sofixa 5mo ago
    > This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there. For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably. For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that. And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.