Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
koenvangilst.nl389 points by vnglst 19 hours ago
389 points by vnglst 19 hours ago
OK, 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
I agree. I am a paying Le Chat Pro user, really rooting for a European alternative. But the quality difference between Mistral and the frontier labs is growing too big to ignore. It’s worrying to me that they didn’t talk much about new models at the conference, because that is really where their focus should be IMHO.
I am wondering what is keeping them back, though: Money? Compute? Skills? Training data? My fear is that you are really only getting really good models by training on very dubious data (outputs from the frontier models etc) and that Mistral is too European and too enterprisey to take those risks.
My theory with no insider information: it’s a little of all of the above, but mostly money. To some extent, you can dig yourself out of a data hole with RL and a lot of compute. And you can buy a lot of compute and some data with a lot of money. Big labs have been operating in this regime for a while and it’s one of the drivers behind their costs beyond just scaling the weights and doing the actual training. Mistral just doesn’t have access to this level of compute or the money to try and muscle their way in.
Don’t they supposedly have a huge amount of EU support?
Or at least there’s been a lot of noise about that.
I wouldn't be surprised if each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU. Chinese firms are a more interesting comparison since there are a fair amount of great models there, and it's estimated about 15% of the ai relevant compute is in China versus maybe 5% in the EU under European companies (and 70% ish in the US is the most common ballpark I see)
I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.
So, more than 70% of the compute on earth?
More than 5%, I assume. From the combination of "5% in the EU under European companies" and "each of the frontier American labs and individually has compute access similar to the entire EU"
I dont't think that was meant to be implied: the EU actually has access to more GPUs than those hosted by European companies in Europe, just as US labs have access to GPUs hosted outside the US
They can get what, 1B euros? 10B when everyone loses their mind? This doesn’t buy nearly enough compute nowadays.
Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI have investors practically begging them to let them buy this much equity at mind-bogging valuations.
The chinese labs manage to do it. Mistral should have enough money.
The EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanisms
It's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support
China is a way more corrupt country but this might be a benefit of less rules.
Huh. It’s weird then that the EU’s words are so many times stronger than their actions.
Like they intentionally want people to think negatively of them, and further doubt their credibility.
You think they're intentionally being bad because they can't manage to pump $65B into a startup on a whim...?
You think well over a year after making grandiose on the record claims is “on a whim”?
What claims are you talking about?
I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.