Good models vs bad models are relative: if this was released in 2020 it would be earth shattering. But releasing a model today that's only on par with open-source dense models a quarter of the size and soundly beaten by open-source MoEs with active param counts a quarter of the size is kind of a flop. The niche for this is basically no one. It'll run at near-zero TPS for the few local model aficionados with enough hardware to try it out, and is lower throughout and lower quality for people trying to use it at scale.

I'm rooting for Mistral, I want them to release good models. This just isn't one. It's a little sad since they once were so prominent for open-source.

Who knows — if they have the compute to train this, they have the compute to train an MoE that's 3-4T total params with 128B active. Maybe they'll make a comeback (although using Llama 2 attention is... not promising). I hope they do.