Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit in Paris

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

▲

simonw 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	bg24 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also Mistral did just the right thing by acquiring Koyeb, to beef up their deployment at scale expertise.
	▲	johnbarron 14 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Lets 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-sentence... "BNP Paribas caught up in French money laundering investigation" - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bnp-paribas-caught-... "BNP Paribas faces $246m fine in currency scandal" - 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/b... In Money Laundering their track record is unmatched: https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/bnp-pariba...

▲

petcat 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe, 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.

▲

Eldodi 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I 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

▲

LucidLynx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

As an European: 100x YES!

I really like the direction and the transparency of Mistral, among those players.