I check almost every mistral model. But to be honest after agentic coding has become a thing, I only test their models in a chat app. I tried their coding TUI a few months back and found that it was way behind. It didn't even support skills back then. I wish they go strong just because they are a big AI player in Europe and I have personal connection to France.
replyMistral’s Vibe CLI does support SKILL.md files.
replymistral was never competitive and is getting less so, but that doesn't matter they cant be allowed to fail and have a long time to find their lane. They're smart and have an audience of like 600m people and the largest governments by spending who would use them if they were good enough.
replyI wonder if they could’ve caught up to Qwen & Gemma by now by now distilling them?
replyIf their best cloud-run offering is far more intelligent than the laptop Gemma / Qwen than nevermind
I would speculate that the purpose is not just to have a domestically owned model that’s as good as the Chinese one, but for the investment to be used to build a domestic industry of people that know how to do it themselves, so as not to rely on foreign parties, so it doesn’t have to be better, just has to be good enough.
replyI love this point
replyIf you're a European AI lab and you see you can't compete with the Amerikans on compute or spending, and the Chinese are open sourcing their LLM work and keeping the Amerikans honest, then there's no real need for you to focus on LLMs
reply> Big 3
replyThis is why Elon’s appealing. I thought they surely had the talent to be considered a fourth at this point. (Oh someone mentioned they’re politically unpopular at work.)
Mistral is super welcome competition, good luck!
No they really don't because Grok is not a competitor. The big 3 are the big 3 because they have historically traded the top place for model intelligence. Grok has never crested that high. People like to think Grok isnt as popular because of elon and politics, but if Grok was the best coding model, nobody would give a fuck. Google has also not led since gemini 2.5 pro. It's really the big 2 at this point.
replyHow much on Kalshi to bet that xAI screws over the Cursor folks out of their $10B/60B deal through some loophole?
replyOnly desperate people would go work for Elon at this point.
Competitive in what sense? In training LLMs? Then they would be below Korea then UAE models.
replyNot really. They have usable models, but it probably Anthropic, OpenAI, Google -> Chinese labs -> NVIDIA, AllenAI, Mistral.
reply