Does Mistral ever advance the state of the art on any dimension?

And if not, why do they exist?

Update: The number of people advocating not innovating is wild. There is no reason why Mistral cannot innovate in ML, they explicitly choose not to. My point is that, given that choice, they should spend their GPU hours differently.

"Sovereign AI" is a joke, there is no substantive difference between a post-trained open weight model from an American or Chinese company and what Mistral is doing today, beyond spending 80% of their GPU hours reproducing a last-gen model's pretraining.

▲

CJefferson 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would the Europeans want a high-quality open source model that isn't either owned by American Trillion-dollar companies or created by the Chinese? You really can't think of any reasons?

	▲	erichocean 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> high-quality open source model > that isn't owned I don't know what definition of open weights you are using, but the "open" part is what allows you to use it without being beholden to American Trillion-dollar companies or the Chinese. Mistral could do exactly what Cursor does, and post-train the model to meet the needs of Europeans. That's a far more efficient (and useful!) use of GPUs than yet another pretrain on an outdated model backbone.

▲

eigenspace 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Has the French military advanced the state of the art on any dimension in the last hundred years?

And if not, why do they exist?

▲

pizzafeelsright 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Second hand rifle distributor?

▲

azan_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course they have!

	▲	eigenspace 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Regardless though, their reason to exist is not to advance the state of the art. Their reason to exist is to ensure the sovereignty of France. Obviously they would do their job better if they were advancing the state of the art, but it's not like it's pointless if they arent the absolute best.

▲

swiftcoder 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So that there exists an EU-native option in the near-frontier LLM space?

Not everyone is wild about being downstream of either the Chinese or US governments, particularly when it comes to things like cybersecurity

▲

embedding-shape 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just like Microsoft and most companies around PCs, their existence isn't about pushing any boundaries, but seemingly targeting deploying what's already been "invented" into the corporate world and bigger companies. Not "wrong", just different.

▲

erichocean 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, agreed. But they do their own pre-training, at great expense, on outdated model backbones.

Wouldn't it be better to do something more like Cursor, and RL on an existing pretrained model if you're not innovating anyway?

	▲	notfromhere 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why build cars when you can just change the seat covers

▲

esafak 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mistral is one of the few European AI labs. Look up "sovereign AI".

▲

whstl 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does erichocean ever advance the state of the art on any dimension?

And if not, why do they exist?

	▲	erichocean 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, actually. Thanks for asking.