Its quite interesting to see that at least the early days of AI so far have not been a winner-take-all runaway acceleration game where catchup is impossible.
I certainly wouldnt have predicted that 10 years ago.
Very glad to see Mistral still in the game even after some big stumbles with Large 3. I deeply hope that this model is 'good enough' that it becomes the European go-to, giving them the resources to keep the pace up.
I think it might have accelerated things but on a much more basic level, there seems to be no real moat in synthesizing the world’s knowledge into LLMs.
I think the moat is going to be compute. So far compute needed to push the frontier is still extremely cheap so the capital can afford to spread its bets. But when further improvement is going to cost in trillions, capital will have to pick a winner and bet only on him. It won't be a matter of finding the best bet, it will be a matter of survival.
This will cause the picked winner to get massively ahead with sheer compute alone used both for training and inference dedicated to recursive self improvement.
My spend on DeepSeek is not much and I regularly top up my balance every month as my support for all the good work DeepSeek is doing for the open science.
DeepSeek, and other Chinese models, are heavily subsidised by the Chinese government. The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US, not because of charity or kindness. It's great for us consumers, but the goal is not to help humanity or open-source.
Framing it that way hides all the levers used to tilt the playing field for US companies, no?
The government that removed restrictions on how private companies can access capital after a certain scale (the JOBS Act), that removed the need for private companies to report as if they were a public company after a shareholder threshold was crossed, superpowering the access of wealthy private investors to get in earlier in a growing company while at the same blocking the public from participating in funding growing enterprises at an earlier stage (since it required companies to IPO much earlier to access capital) which allowed retail investors to also reap the rewards on funding them early when they grew to become behemoths (like Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Google, etc.).
It's not fair in either place, the USA has its own model of unfairness, China has a completely different one. The difference is that in the USA the government allows private investors to become more powerful than the State (outside of the monopoly of violence) while plunging the rest of society into increasingly more precarious lives while in China the State is the power and its legitimacy only exists while the population feel they have a better life.
IMO the selective enforcement of regulatory requirements should be added to the list. Observing from the outside, I have a hard time believing that e.g. musks gas powered data centers really follow all the environmental laws, for example, or that the authorities really see no grounds for indictment if Altmans company hacks hundreds of third parties, or that there's really no one at the SEC having a problem with Anthropics fear mongering prior to the IPO.
If you think about it, the US labs are heavily subsidised too. Not only they receive billions in state funding, the administration is also prepared to engage in trade wars to help them.
I think the Chinese government is backing their labs by less direct means. For example cheap electricity and investing in chip manufacturers such as Huawei and cxmt.
Deepseek specifically, is known to operate with minimal resources. The entire company has around 160 employees and every model they release must break even within ten months.
SpaceX has been awarded roughly $22 billion to nearly $30 billion in cumulative public federal contracts, the $280 billion CHIP act, and who knows how much the CIA + NSA are spending.
I'm pretty sure, the training/fine tune through Claude/OpenAi would not be possible without the army/China's hacking teams (and legal protection). So it's more than just a cheap electricity.
Supporting deepseek is just like supporting the Chinese army, no need for that. Though it goes both ways, OpenAi subscription just lowers the cost of the US army as well.
Sorry, are you saying that it's a subsidy that it's legal for them to distill other models, or what? It's not even clear that there's any kind of protection for models in Western countries. Why would they be worried about the legality of distillation? And what does the army have to do with distilling models? Like you're saying it's a subsidy that China protects their borders from invasion by the US?
It's not a subsidy for the Chinese to say they're going to ignore our IP laws. It's a subsidy for us to say we're going to make them and try to push them on the world. It's literally granting a monopoly by legal force. It's very obviously not aligned with the interests of the American people, while China releasing things in the open is.
The Chinese army isn’t bombing countries around the world or overthrowing governments and stealing gold and oil around the planet. Meanwhile the US military is doing so and is preparing to
Do more of that. The Chinese have a rational approach to trade, national infrastructure, education, safety nets, healthcare and much more.
> I think the Chinese government is backing their labs by less direct means.
It may be that the effect of the backing in both places is essentially equal but this statement is strange. The Chinese government invests directly in Deepseek[1]. Notice the article, in addition to saying the CCP is investing, says Tencent is also a major backer. CCP owns a golden share of Tencent.
Well, they are helping 17% of the world's population, and the US is currently actively engaged in trade wars and economic warfare or explicitly attempting to leverage it's hegemony against its long term alliea for short term gain.
There is as much to criticize about American hyper scalers and AI labs and the lack of interest in helping humanity or contributing to open source, but that might not be as popular an opinions on this site.
> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US
The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.
Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]
Same goes for the US companies as well. Current US administration wants US to win the AI race at any cost and China is the only competitor left in the race. Winners always write the history or in this case the future of humanity
If you want a direct example of the US subsidising a major AI lab, we can use Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Microsoft has the largest ownership stake - 27%.
Microsoft did not pay with money - it paid (mostly) with Azure cloud computing credits. MSOFT is then able to write this off as a loss against tax.
It is generally far more tax-efficient in the US to write a loss in this way than it is to write a loss for a cash investment.
In this case, I believe the difference was ultimately highly significant. When including MSOFT eventually writing-off the deprecating Azure hardware it had used to buy the OpenAI equity, the result was MSOFT's tax reduction being either close-to or exceeding the actual cash value of MSOFT's investment in OpenAI - IIRC.
These examples represent taxes that the US chooses not to collect - the US could choose to make investments like these less tax-efficient. Instead, by making them extremely tax-efficient, the US subsidises the transaction hugely.
Even ignoring monetary subsidies, there are the non-monetary ones: not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries, the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy, the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated.
That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
That isn't normally how enforcement works, and it hasn't been very long since they disclosed those breaches. If the victims want to pursue legal action, they can, and they still may!
> the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy
So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
> the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated
Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
The original comments is "DeepSeek, and other Chinese models, are heavily subsidised by the Chinese government"
> That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
I am listing for you the non-monetary subsidies, which are just as real and equally important.
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
If it was one of the Chinese labs doing this hacking, the government would be stepping in. If it was European labs they'd be stepping in. If it was you or I the government would be stepping in. That is a massive subsidy (they don't have to worry about the same legal fees and exposure) and being allowed to continue doing business is in fact priceless.
> So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
There is no conspiracy. They are objectively operating by a different set of rules than you or I could operate in this market.
> Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
I never said it wasn't, I'm saying that it's happening here and it's a very real subsidy.
I heard someone calling the key metric in Anthropic financial reports EBBT: Earnings Before Bad Things[1] :-)
[1] Where "Bad Things" would be the typical interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation plus the Anthropic specific employee compensation, LLM training (you know, for the LLM lab), revenue sharing agreements (which is a form of paying for infrastructure), etc.
A recent YouTube video by Patrick Boyle said the same thing. They are only profitable if you ignore all the costs that make them unprofitable such as paying employees and developing A models.
The government, specifically Trump's government and the current money circle in AI inflating American company stocks. In addition to all that American models do not share their papers like Deepseek and Qwen do. So you can literally say Chinese models are doing it for charity at this point.
At least DeepSeek didn't build its models on government subsidies. It came out of a quantitative hedge fund, so funding was never really an issue for them.
I'm not sure "subsidised" is the right word. If a government funds research and the results are released openly, that's just publicly funded research. It's how a lot of science works in the US and Europe too.
The open-weight models are a great boon to all American companies other than a handfull of Mega Corps in the A.I business. Care to explain how this is "economic warfare against the U.S"
> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US, not because of charity or kindness
There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.
A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.
If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.
It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.
The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.
I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.
It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.
But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.
This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.
I wish US was rich enough to subsidise development of open source science and useful open AI models. I wouldn't mind US waging this kind of wconomic warefare against China or everyone else on the world.
Charity and kindness is not a motivation, it's an outcome of what you do.
Economic warfare against the US? I mean maybe against specific US companies and stakeholders but on the whole it seems like it's good for the US economy as well as the rest of the world, kind of like supplying free electricity would be
It's one of these rare cases where intention is not what is the most important - the net benefit for consumers and companies outside of the USA is indisputable.
I’m neither in the camp of Chinese or the Americans(collective West) in general..
As a neutral party, this characterization is crazy.
As if the AI companies - Claude and OpenAI are guardians of freedom and humanity and very charitable to the global society without any self interests…
“Chinese models are subsidized by the Chinese Government, therefore they’re inherently bad for humanity” is a highly propagandist argument. The politics of US vs China may be whatever it is in reality.. You have one company releasing their models for cheap, actually open sourcing their trained weights, and publishing details of their optimizations and learnings for others to use. The other camp actively “aligning” their models, nerfing their capabilities, hyping their swarm activities from poor sandboxes, and trying their best to lock users into their harnesses and walled platforms. They are subsidized by the capitalist VCs who are essentially waiting for their payouts..
At some point, one has to see things for what they are and evaluate their own reasoning..
I’m happy to stay provider agnostic, try all models and cheer any useful progress as open as possible.
If your belief is accurate, we should expect China to short the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI and release better frontier models immediately after their IPOs.
Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.
I don't think that's likely because my understanding is that Chinese people in mainland China have a tricky time shorting American stocks due to Chinese capital controls.
Not sure why so many people will vehemently refuse this idea. I won’t say it’s 100% true but it would be foolish to dismiss it. China is very much an adversary to America and has made it pretty clear they want to be a dominant leader of not the new world leader. Not here to evaluate what is good or bad. Keep in mind historically China has aggressively fostered industry (not unlike the west) but sometimes even more aggressively.
Americans need to travel to China. The Chinese have zero issues with us. They quite like Americans. This is such a weird propagandist take. Idk if you remember but both country's leaders just had a slumber party for 3 days in DC. This is not what enemies do.
Not even our leaders say China is an enemy, ita mostly businessmen who are scared of competition and trying to regulate chinese out of their markets so they can make more money milking us.
I have been to China many times. The citizens and visiting the country has nothing to do with global politics. Your take is just as propagandist as any other. China is not unlike the US and China has also made it subtly clear their desire to be a dominant global force. I am not marking judgement on it but don’t be a fool thinking that China is not some level of threat. This is how these discussions become weird. I don’t think China is going to blow up the US and I think it’s often a weird talking point by some US politicians but I also don’t think they are a peaceful actor but folks like you will suggest I am repeating propaganda. No, just pointing out that if you look at their language and actions they are an actor to pay attention to. Just because leaders meet means nothing.
Economic warfare against the US is charity and kindness to a sizable portion of the world's population, especially when the US uses it's global hegemony as warfare against them. Neither system is perfect, but lets not be disingenuous.
> DeepSeek, and other Chinese models, are heavily subsidised by the Chinese government.
Yes, because everything China does is against the US. That's all they think about day and night. God forbid they want to corner the global market or have a genuine business case. How dare they provide options for those who can't afford a measly $200 a month? How can we let Chinese labs publish research for free for the whole world so that they can benefit? The nerve! To think they can use soft power instead of military might! I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are the last bastions of human kindness and charity. Right?
Meanwhile, American AI models are heavily subsidized by stock market speculation. Ultimately, the subsidies from both countries are flowing out of the pockets of individuals.
What's wrong with governments subsidizing scientific work?
You think extremely US-centric. China has a different economic model than US and your rules for a specific kind of Capitalism may not apply to them. You assume a country of 1.4 Billion people is obsessed with a couple of foreign AI companies. What if they don't care.
Why the anti China propaganda from you? The United States is doing the same thing here and making American multi-billionaires even wealthier. The greed of American AI, GPU and memory and storage corporations is a black hole on availability to humans around the World. The result is a massive financial bubble promoted by the American Government to the detriment of our citizens. The USA has an AI ponzy scheme shuffling the same money between data center owners (Oracle & X), Nvidia and memory & storage vendors.
A conspiracy to make the US look bad by being better at producing all the goods and services the world needs at a reasonable price. Have they no shame?
> are heavily subsidised by the Chinese government
We hear this about literally every industry the Chinese excel in - that it's only because the government subsidizes them that they succeed. For chip manufacturing, for batteries, for EVs, for solar, for AI. I don't see how the chinese government can afford to subsidize all of these industries and still have them contribute to the GDP.
Not really this is an X algo conspiracy. Up until recently the Chinese government wasn't even that invested in these companies. We're talking very very small grants compared to training costs.
Its very xenophobic of you to say China has zero intention of helping humanity, and just wants to "wage economic warfare".
Last time I checked, it was ourselves (USA) waging economic warfare on 2/3rds of the world.
I dont get this cope people have where people have this idea that its impossible for a Chinese company (that make billions of dollars) to have done something by their own merit, but instead its always some Chinese Communist Party conspiracy where the main goal is to destroy America.
They're trying to pull digitally what they already pulled physically. The reason we can't manufacture a grill brush for a reasonable price is the result of years of Americans choosing the cheapest price. We gave up our manufacture base. They want us to give up our labs.
Deindustrializing a country is not something consumers can achieve. It starts at the top level, with politicians who construct a financial system where it's more profitable to speculate than to build or invest in real businesses.
I'm not sure I like this framing - so much of AI research has been academic, in the open, building on others people's work. Much less comp sci generally, math & philosophy, etc. The idea that rich companies can just build stuff in secret because they have resources is a fantasy.
Architectural/algorithmic tweaks do advance the efficiency frontier nicely. But raw intelligence mostly comes from data (not just its sheer quantity, but also how it's curated & cleansed) and the scaling law. The know-how about data curation doesn't seem to get published much, even among the open-weight labs, though.
Also, the field moves fast, but slower than people do. Researchers and engineers switch companies every year or two, and the know-how walks out the door with them.
Europeans are irrelevant these days, surpassed by China, S Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. Europe is coasting on former glory and now has regulated itself to death and vacationed its advantages away.
You've got to think the comments about "good enough" are people who have not yet tried Opus 5.5. I haven't been this struck by a step change since 4.5/4.6. It's a bigger jump even than when Fable first arrived.
As for Mistral - I got really excited when they said Large 4 was focusing on being #1 in cybersecurity, because that's somewhere that they genuinely could edge out Anthropic & OpenAI. Have it actually solve problems, instead of Anthropic flagging "you tried to find a null pointer exception bug in your own code, we're now reporting you to the US government". But on the Mistral benchmarks I'm seeing, this looks very disappointing, but at least they haven't entirely given up. I genuinely thought Mistral had given up on new general models. They need to learn the bitter lesson all over again.
If Opus 5.5 is 500x better than Deepseek, but Deepseek can solve all your problems, maybe you need to work on better problems. If you don't, and you're in business, your competitors will work on the better problems. If you're an employee, your employer might prefer to pay Anthropic instead of you. If you're doing projects you're interested in, you can tackle more ambitious projects with a more capable model.
This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5. Well, mostly. It doesn't implement task switching yet; we'll see if it runs into a wall at some point. But it boots in QEMU, and it's running a user process in ring 3 and serving web pages.
Yeah no, if you elicit Opus 5.5 , anyone else can, and you have no moat either.
But if on the other hand, I mostly use my human intelligence and just need a dumb model to complement my human intelligence at low cost and high speed (say review every commit to catch obvious bugs), I have a much better chance of building an actual moat than you do.
But outside of coding, it’s even more clear that you don’t need frontier intelligence. My customer service agent is very happy with a 100B param Deepseek flash model, thank you!
Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed.
Obviously any model will do if you use it as a better autocomplete.
I believe that there is a large gap in expectations between different workflows.
Until the AI like reads my mind and produces perfectly production ready apps with minimal intervention from my side, there is still going to be room for improvement.
I use Opus 5.5 daily for my job. I am aware (and in awe of) it's capabilities.
Look at the context in which I used that term 'good enough'.
What i was saying is that there are tasks for which a dumber model can be good enough, and for organizations with sovereignty/ privacy concerns, those concerns can be strong enough to incentivize the use of a dumber model.
“Good enough” as in we don’t see any point in 1-shotting everything we want to build in lightning speed. If Opus 5.5 can 1 shot it then that product is essentially commodified, no point in any one building it except as an internal tool.
If Opus can’t 1-shot it, then it must rely on our human intelligence which can be complemented well enough with a dumb model as a frontier model.
Try a bigger code base or more complex stuff and you will easily see that the solution, speed and amount of problems Opus5.5 solves vs older models is relevant.
I am frequently running agents on a multi-microservice application workspace where I really need the 1M context windows, because they are filled to the brim when implementing features that require changes on several services and APIs.
This works fine with Opus 5.5. But it also works fine with GPT 6.1 Sol, Kimi K3 and MiMo 2.6 Pro.
It doesn't work equally well with Sonnet 5.5, interestingly.
I agree; yes, I can see that they need a bit less hand holding each cycle, but I also see these "frontier" agents do some absolutely dumb shit that I have to correct and then I'm wondering if I'm the looney one here.
Maybe it's because people stopped watching what their agents are doing and stopped looking at the quality of the output. But I still see agents being absolutely mindless like a junior dev.
Recent example: it updated an an API to add newly released models to the backend. There's a list of models that require specific configuration for the reasoning effort and temperature or the API call fails. GPT 6.1 Sol misses this and code fails at runtime because the newer models need to be added to the list for special handling of temp and reasoning. Fixes it for one model and tests it for that model using an E2E test. But doesn't test the other models that were added for the same error condition...I had to explicitly ask it to do so and it finds them and adds them to the list and says "that's on me."
Please, give it another 6 months and they catch up. The American labs are currently trying everything they can to block others instead of advancing their models, trying to build an artificial moat. The American models are not that great, they are good, and they have a lot of agentic workflows in the back, but its basically a hardware limitation at this point. Once the HW makers catch up, and we can move away from the Nvidia monopoly, things will speed up quite a lot IMO.
We've been hearing the line about them only being a few months behind for a year now, during which time O/A have grown their revenue like 10x, haven't they?
We've also been hearing we're 6 months from AGI for about three years, and here we are.
"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Those are two different things. The market is expanding, so even if competitors are catching up, you can have your own revenue, in absolute terms, grow.
I do a broad amount of diverse experiments/projects I always wanted to do and throwing Opus5.5 against it just works
I have to admit, Sonnet got really good too.
But Opus just uses tools, a broad spectrum of it, etc. it feels like sure if you add some router behind it you could split it up if you need to but if you give me the choice, its opus allll day long.
I agree that Opus and GPT are almsot surely better, but so many real users are nervous enough about giving Anthropic and OpenAI access to all of their internal information that they may be willing to stomach worse models if it gives them more security.
The real question is if this model is good enough that it can still accelerate work, and not be a hindrance to real work like older Mistral models often were.
The Navier-Stokes fiasco made me push for local/controlled models very hard. "Can't rule out" that they stole data (backed up by their backdoor offers of sharing credit).
If these companies will steal from deep pockets like Disney or Sony (some of the most infamously litigious copyright trolls to ever exist), they won't think twice of stealing every bit of code you upload to them.
If your code passes through an AI company's servers, you can assume you just gave it to them. In turn, when your competitor tries to copy that new feature you just added, the AI is now trained in exactly how to copy you and eliminate your competitive edge. Unlike your employees, the AI isn't bound by the same rules and even if it were and violated them, your company probably doesn't have enough money to prove it in court (and that's if we somehow reverse some of the stupid "AI is the most transformative use of copyright I've ever seen" judges who have drunk the coolaid).
Most companies could build the compute to run GLM or Kimi models for way less than the potential loss due to IP theft from using third-party systems.
I would also add to this, there are ways to use customer data to improve your model outside of just using it as “training-data”.
A simple loophole, use the code to create an RLVR environment where the resultant code is the end goal / max reward. Technically the customer data is never trained upon, but effectively you’re using it. Even better, use the code as a seed to generate synthetic data similar to it and use that synthetic data as rewards in an RLVR model.
Unless you can host the ChatGPT model on your own servers, which I know some enterprises are doing, I don’t think there’s any hope of protecting your data / competitive advantage from these frontier companies. Better to be paranoid, than be commodified by these companies.
It's an improvement, but game changer might be a bit of a stretch. If I lost access to Anthropic or OpenAI models tomorrow, I would be annoyed, but would reach for a slightly inferior model. Last year I wouldnt be able to say the same, and rhe challenge is that the moat is drying up fast. Whether its general improvements in model training by other competitors, or straight up distillation of SOTA models, the moat is shrinking and the available capital and spend for American model providers is going to dry up quickly as competing good enough models are adopted by more consumers.
It's especially the case as more non-Americans look to self hosted models and domestic cloud inference providers using open models that the US providers who are still leading the charge need to drastically drop their prices and find a path to profitability in order to maintain their lead and retain the advantage they had as AI turns into a commodity (which is happening faster than I think even the frontier labs initially predicted).
I hear this literally every other week about whatever the newest FoTM model is.
Unless you can provide concrete examples of things you can do with them that you simply couldn't do with last week's model, it's absolutely meaningless.
Yeah, I agree with this. I think the "the models are good enough" narrative is a myth. I've heard it so many times over the last year, but the model number keeps changing...
There is no ceiling on what you can accomplish with more intelligence, so there will always be a market for the best models, and that market is likely to just keep growing. If Opus 13.5 can one-shot a profitable company or discover a new disease treatment or whatever you can think of that a swarm of relentless super-geniuses could accomplish, companies (and governments) will throw money at it.
I also think there will always be a market for many sub-frontier models that will continue to grow rapidly as well, because "good enough" is definitely a thing for a given task.
One could still argue that models are good enough for a given task. I primarily use Opus at work for writing code and I realized that for my usage the intelligence of Opus 4.8 is more than enough. Sure the newer models are better but I can still do my work with having access to newer models
Seems silly not to have predicted that 10 years ago. I feel like it's long been obvious that smarter models being available will mean way easier cheap synthetic data and access to tools that will speed up competitors as well as consumers.
On a purely technical level, maybe? But in terms of actual revenue, is there really any chance of anyone catching the big labs?
Obviously, this is only a valid question if you don't believe that open weights are about to eat their lunch and their revenue is about to collapse, or they're running a super unprofitable ponzi scheme propped up by investor money that's about to collapse like a house of cards. I don't find those positions credible at all though.
If you do, then this question isn't really for you, as I'm more interested in thoughts from those who think that OpenAI and Anthropic in particular are about to be the largest companies on earth in a couple years. Could anyone catch them at that point?
> But in terms of actual revenue, is there really any chance of anyone catching the big labs?
I don't know about revenue, but I suspect multiple other labs are already beating OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability. Staying on the frontier is expensive, and it's hard to recoup those R&D costs when you have a bunch of other labs nipping at your heels.
If you concede the previous point, then the only way for OpenAI/Anthropic to keep growing long term is to swallow the whole economy (i.e. mass job replacemnt), and that's a bet I wouldn't take.
I think the actual plan is to swallow a good portion of the job market. It’s the only thing that makes sense and I hear VC podcast debates on which percentage of jobs justifies the market cap.
Maybe. I can't freaking wait for the IPO filings so we can finally put all this to rest. (haha, like that'll actually put it to rest on HN, but at least we'll have better data)
They are very unprofitable…? I don’t think that’s really in dispute. We haven’t yet seen a profitable frontier lab and model pricing remains fairly subsidized
Impressive vision benchmarking. If the vision model is truly as good as astra, that would make it best in the world.
Also strong on cyber benchmarks (better than all chinese models), so this is a good defender model.
Lots of people shitting of Mistral for no reason imo. These are pretty good numbers across the board. Definitely good enough to use as a daily driver over other llms, if you have moral qualms with the others. For certain use cases, like cyber security, this may be the go to model.
I like to make fun of europe, but there's lots for mistral to be proud about in this release imo.
The paradox between supporting consumer rights with actions like universal usb-c adoption, but also complete elimination of any privacy rights at all. Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.
Isn't that just the recent highly controversial Chat Control push? Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.
> Curious, what do you like to make fun of Europe about?
Well I'm european and... That Switzerland (Europe but not EU) has more companies in the Top 70 by market cap than the entire EU (Switzerland has two, the EU only has ASML) is kinda something that warrants making fun of.
That the biggest European software company is SAP, in 71th position is both sad and tragic: it shows how lame and irrelevant Europe is when it comes to software.
So Europe is nowhere in software and friggin nowhere in hardware: sure it's got ASML but ASML now has officially... Zero customer in Europe. Zero is not much.
Then Japan is at least trying to come back into the game with nano imprint litography. Europe is betting it all on AMSL (which anyway is majoritarily US-owned).
So software: nothing. Hardware: nothing besides ASML.
Overall the EU has six companies in the Top 100 by market cap and they're all, besides ASML, near the bottom of the Top 100.
We could also maybe make a bit fun of how the EU destroyed it's car industry (the main industry in Germany, which is the biggest economy of the union) by handing it all to chinese EVs?
Or what about the US warning the EU, years ago, to not become entirely dependent on Russia for energy? And EU not listening and then seeing its energy price skyrocket when the proverbial shit hit the fan? (Russia attacking Ukraine)
And we could, also, at least make a bit of fun of entire streets in cities like Paris and Brussels that used to have luxury shops and fancy restaurants that are all turned into places selling cheap kebabs? What a great success: I'm sure this one makes the komrades happy. It projects an image of grandeur and success: kebabs.
Or the constant attacks on free speech in the EU. Or the surveillance apparatus that's being put into place.
And let's not forget: there were promises made to Russia to never grow the EU to the east. Then the EU started exciting Russia by saying they'd incorporate Ukraine into the EU: I'm not against that but doing that did trigger a war. And now suddenly the EU is waking up and feeling all warmongering, wanting to dedicate a big percentage of its spending to weapons and tanks and missiles.
The warmongering tiny pet that the EU is is kinda laughable too.
At this point it's more like I don't know what is there left to not make fun of about my EU.
Europe has spent the last twenty years in stagnation - generating about half as much wealth and technology as you'd expect for its size and advanced economy. Simultaneously, Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination.
Edit: unfortunately, it's a question that voting does not really permit you to answer on this website.
The US is biased to favor the top half of society. Hence why there is a lot of vocal poorer people and a lot of low profile wealthier people (I'm not including the 1% or even the 5% in this).
When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.
I'm biased as well, being American. I think I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than the USA as well. Middle class in the US is a constant feeling of the ladder dissolving just beneath you.
Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans. They also have so much better transport infrastructure it's embarrassing for Americans. Like all the money America generates, where does it go?
> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.
I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.
Trends become the future. If European stagnation continues, those advantages will vanish by the time we're old.
I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.
Well, the Scandinavian and Sicilian do share one currency and one immigration policy and one set of regulations - which are the things that we generally look at when we analyze economies.
Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns all use a different currency. Finns and Sicilians do share a currency though, but all these countries have different immigration policies and regulations. I don't think you really know how the EU works.
read Varoufakis for the story on how this happened. European surplus capital gets recycled as VC money into Silicon Valley. So it's not like there's some big choice to be made, its potentially a systemic part of the global monetary flows.
A 'bubble bursting', if that happens, doesn't make the tech sector go to zero. Apple doesn't suddenly stop making iPhones. It would take a hell of a lot more than that for the US economy to fall to European levels.
If the UK is in europe, you should make fun of the following: they don't have a first amendment. So to me, it's an authoritarian state preaching freedom.
The order of amendments is just the order in which the constitution has been amended. It's meaningless to talk about "first amendments" in other countries. Talk about the actual laws and rights described therein.
And as you can probably tell by now, the first amendment in the US is not actually preventing the US government from promoting a specific religion or silencing speech. It's just words on a paper at this point. Look at the actual practice.
Several European countries do a much better job at protecting the rights described in the first amendment to the US constitution.
> The order of amendments is just the order in which the constitution has been amended. It's meaningless to talk about "first amendments" in other countries.
Also, at least here in Brazil, the way the constitution is amended is by patching it. For instance, our constitutional amendment number 115 (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/e...) patches article 5 of the constitution to add protection of personal data as a right. But we wouldn't talk about "amendment 115", we would instead talk about "article 5 item LXXIX of the constitution"; that is, what matters is the patched text, not the law that patched it.
I don't know about other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if they take a similar approach.
The UK does not have what? Book bans? Science censorship by the government? The government pushing TV shows off the air for criticising the government? The president banning certain news media for asking questions he doesn't like?
The UK is not the world's biggest champion of free speech, but I think it's still doing better than the US right now.
I mean laws and rights are only useful if enforced. If the arm of government responsible for enforcement just doesn't and the people allow it, then what good is that purported freedom?
Not bad! I like how it got the motion lines on the correct side. IIRC, many of the other ones you've posted have the motion lines on both sides of the pelican
A strong competitor in cybersecurity as an alternative to GLM-5.3 (Mistral reports 82% on CyberGym-E2E). Visual grounding is also impressive (42% on Dense 200 vs. 41% for GPT-6 Astra).
Otherwise, behind on the broader Pareto frontier, but not by much (Vals Index: 48.05% vs. GLM-5.3’s 53.51%; $13.78 vs. $7.25 per test). Many companies will prefer it over Chinease models.
That was about my conclusion as well: Slightly less than GLM 5.3 performance but made in Europe. So, maybe it answers Tiananmen Square questions correctly, and in French. All in all, a reasonable model, but not frontier.
> So, maybe it answers Tiananmen Square questions correctly
What would you consider a "correct" answer? I just asked deepseek-v4.1-flash asking it what happened (without mentioning the word "protest"; here are some excerpts of what it said:
> In April 1989, students in Beijing began demonstrations after the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party general secretary. The protests grew. [..] Estimates from other sources range from hundreds to several thousand deaths. [..] The Chinese government describes the events as a counter-revolutionary riot and says the military action was necessary to restore stability. It restricts public discussion of the events inside China. Many other governments, human rights organizations, and observers describe the events as a violent suppression of peaceful protests.
So, let's see... it calls it a "protest", mentions the number of deaths, and even mentions the censorship of the topic by the CCP.
"..answers Tiananmen square questions correctly.."- but lies about Ukraine, EU, and about you, americans..
I live in EU, use for my personal needs chinese models only, and don't plan to move to any of the ones allied with the Pentagon or its european counterparts.
It's a bit below DeepSeek 4.1 Flash at about twice the size. For a model that was supposed to come out a few months ago this is pretty good. Mistral catching up to the chinese open-weight models is great news. Excited to see how they will build on that!
Man, a lot of this discussion sounds like people cheering for the last kid crossing the finish line.
Surely we want competition and Europe involved in that, but at this point I have grown used to either American labs smashing the frontier remarkably fast, or Chinese labs getting way, way closer than you would expect them to.
Mistral’s progress, regrettably, feels much slower. This model doesn’t knock anybody’s socks off. The model is (and I hate to be this harsh) mediocre, and this mediocrity has also arrived months late.
People were extremely dismissive of chinese models until recently. They went from 1 year behind frontier to 6 months behind frontier to 3 months behind frontier extremely fast.
First few models will always be slow improving and worse. The way to improvement is working your way through a gajillion evals [1], finding bugs, gaps, and curating training data (this part involves human design as well as raw inference compute) to fix it. This is very time intensive and can't easily be "done once and then everyone has lesser work to do" since every model is different. Well, one way to accelerate it is to simply have more compute, which mostly openai and anthropic have[2].
This is mistrals first 1T-scale model and I expect the 4th or 5th generation to be close to the best for many purposes.
[1] These evals differ from the public ones like terminal-bench, are sometimes model-specific, need real, diverse usage to actually create, and are held secretly since quality of eval is the first driver behind the next step improvement of a model.
[2] It is not close. This model was trained on less than 4k GPUs, whereas astra used north of 100k GPUs.
Mistral is not that new a player though. How can we give them this much grace when other players like xAI have done more in even less time? I don't think coddling Mistral helps them.
And to the point of scale and training cluster, so what? Not only do Chinese labs have smaller clusters with less empowered GPUs, compute is Mistral's responsibility. You can't take away from other labs just because they fulfill that responsibility better.
I’d rather have one European AI lab like Mistral, with the financial firepower and compute to pretrain its own large models, than 20 weak labs that fine-tune Chinese models.
AI needs big bucks, and Mistral is Europe’s Anthropic.
The US has made sure that Mistral has a large market in the EU by temporarily preventing non citizens from accessing Fable.
A lot of European companies now want a model the US can't cut off, but also lack trust in Chinese models.
Some of these will self host Mistral but most will pay them by the token. It's not going to be a huge market or a huge margin within that market but probably it'll be enough.
This is the exact mentality that makes the EU fall behind. If you don't want to invest in something until it makes a profit, you don't get the benefits of being a pioneer.
there are no profitable AI companies at the moment ... This is the exact problem of European startups, trying to make them profitable from day 1 while American counterparts (and Chinese) keep bleeding money for years. Europe will never have a Tesla, a Google or an Amazon with that mindset.
Google treats its customers the same way as Amazon treats its employees. Any sane person stays away from its services because a bot can close an account for no reason, and there will be no recourse. A total shit company, like some illegal IPTV provider: no accountability, and when the service disappears, you have nobody to turn to.
> Europe needs profitable AI companies, not money pits.
AI is a strategic technology with obvious national security implications. EU should invest in its development whether it's currently profitable or not.
That said I love that they don't seem to restrict cyber capabilities to any degree and even lean into it.
If the best model for cyber attacks is open for everyone to use it just makes us all safer I think. Of course you then also HAVE to use it or otherwise you're vulnerable, which is a great distribution play.
Seems hard to get customers at that price range when you're competing with open source models that are 1/2 - 1/3 the price but with similar capabilities.
People usually buy the cheapest, like Deepseek or GLM or they spend on Anthropic/OpenAI subs.. Are these models in the middle getting any users?
On a side note, I wonder if this was the popular free Space Bunny model that left openrouter yesterday.
If you are a EU company worried about your data then mistral is your only option. Think about EU military companies. They can't use US and Chinese models.
You are quoting the discount pricing. It is 50% off for the next two weeks. The blog post has the real pricing up front in the card on the right side: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/
After that, it will be much closer to GLM 5.3, but you can also get 5.3 in their API! I dont see people really talking about that.
Nice! Once they make it available through their API I will be happy to support them. My local Qwen3.8 27B is serving me well, but I miss the speed and concurrency that comes with subscriptions, and I am not currently paying for any.
Well, with this and Beam people are going to have to stop saying that western open models are dead. This is great news. Anthropic and OpenAI may have a bit more knowledge, talent and compute but they don't have a monopoly.
Investors looking for them to make monopoly profits are going to be disappointed The premium they can extract from consumers for their models will be capped. Tokens are likely to remain close to the cost of compute, a cost which is high but falling fast.
Also, yay Europe! Although the comparison between this and mimo 2.6 is not flattering...
49b active parameters sounds manageable until you look at the 1t total weights. what hardware does a usable self-hosted setup actually need, especially once you add a long context?
I tried Mistral's last 3 large models, devstral and mistrallarge3 and the numbers were not even benchmaxxed, but just false. the models were so weak and garbage. Let's hope they are telling the truth this time around, we need more alternatives. There mistral-small and original MistralLarge models were awesome, hoping they are back!
Give them time. ML 4.0 was just pretrained. Mistral will certainly use it as the base for distillation and RL for smaller, better, more efficient iterations, just as the competition does.
I tried a quick abbreviated kimbench on their playground before bothering to do the whole thing.
Maybe I didn't really select mistral 4? Either way, failed completely on question 1 and the next 2 questions were completely off base too. I didn't bother to finish.
Excited to test this on my benchmark[1], but I'm guessing it won't fare better than MiMo v2.6 Pro which is currently the best open-weight model as far as I'm concerned.
Why isn't this on openrouter yet? Is there a better router that gets models much quicker?
What experience have people had with Mistral models for cyber research? are they as constrainted as Anthropic models? I use claude day2day but have the need for a model with fewer guardrails to pentest our own APIs.
They explicitly lean in to cyber work, and they appear to be very permissive from their marketing:
> This is particularly important in cybersecurity, where provider-level refusals can block legitimate vulnerability research and incident response, and where losing access to a capability mid-incident can itself become a critical security risk. ML4 pairs top-tier cyber performance with open weights and self-deployment, giving organizations both the capability and the autonomy to run advanced security work under their own policies.
> That top score reflects a practical advantage. Several leading closed models, including Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, score near zero on the same test because they refuse to perform the task. Yet defending software often starts with proving that a flaw is real, exactly the kind of work safety filters in closed models can block. This matters even more as threat actors increasingly jailbreak those same models to support offensive cyber activity
Seems like they've finally made a genuinely competitive model since the original LLM craze, congrats to them! Glad to see some diversification in open weights providers.
if it's not available yet why have a 'try it today' header at all?
> "Try it today"
>
> There is still more to come. As we work toward releasing the weights, we will share further details on the model architecture, additional benchmarks, and our post-training methodology.
This sure is nice, but I've had less than satisfactory results with GLM5.3. I'd like Mistral to compete with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next a 120B class model that IMO is the first model that I can use for serious coding while running it locally.
I estimate it's coding ability on par with opus 4.6 (but opus definitely beats it on factual knowledge) Still it's a genuinely useful model, when everything else except Anthropic's models (and for only 3 weeks after it came out Google's Gemini 3 pro, before it got merged) are not to me.
If you scroll down, most of the charts on that page are sorted s.t. Mistral's bar is right next to the worst competitor model, while the best competitor model's bar is positioned on the opposite side.
If one were to be cynical one could say that it's intentionally making Mistral's result look better than it actually is by making it harder to compare the bar heights.
Yes broad consensus had developed in the ten minutes between announcement and you asking if consensus had developed, and I'm excited to report that it consensed in the affirmative -- it IS Space Bunny Alpha!
I mean no disrespect but these are terrible numbers or am I missing something? It seems like Mistral continues to only be relevant for people that want a model trained in Europe. Too bad.
Non-American maybe, but non-Chinese is likely impractical. We might not want their APIs, but we can't compete on energy and labour for training, even if it means buying licenses to host the weights (which CADA encourages). From China's perspective, what's the case for baking weights they can't sell? Some Chinese models already don't even have the Taiwan politics stuff baked in, those filters are only in their APIs.
I realised after writing this, the EU as is uncomfortably often the case, may be the real forcing function for what happens with US policy irrespective of the media campaigns we're presently seeing. Here's hoping for a steady trickle of stale ChatGPT weights leaking from EU infra providers in the long term.
> we can't compete on energy and labour costs for training,
Specialists are expensive everywhere. China is functionally 80s Japan surrounded by several Brasils and all the frontier AI work is being done in that first part, where labour is expensive - if only due to competition for top talent.
Using Chinese models is a bit like using Chinese solar/batteries instead of American gas.
Yes, if the Chinese stop trading, you can still use the existing solar panels (unlike the gas which you literally set on fire), but it's nonetheless a major vulnerability to not have any local know-how in creating important infrastructure.
Giving up all AI know-how and expertise to China just because they currently share their models would be a generational mistake.
Europe already got burned hard by this sort of thing too recently, and is now very sensitive to strateigic depencencies, and is working hard to lift them where possible.
If trade stopped, AI capability would be the last thing on the minds of administrations in both regions. The question I think is more if EU can't compete (and we know we can't) who the more reliable partner is to depend on, especially where leaning towards dependence on that partner applies pressure to a recently highly unreliable partner.
Yes we absolutely can compete. That's such a dumb defeatist attitude.
And I dont mean actual trade stopping in the case of AI. The CCP could ban the release of Open Weight models tomorrow without running afoul of a single trade treaty
Maybe we lived on different planets at the time, but watching the response at the start of the Ukraine war taught me the EU is little more than a disjointed balancing act with no real potency of its own outside of economic policy, and that seems unlikely to change in my lifetime. We are still buying their gas to this very day.
I didn't say they did (though granted, I believe it's the case). What matters here is that countries without their own AI labs have multiple potential partners to choose from.
Having a third option significantly lowers the leverage that both China and the USA have over other countries.
Mistral is the only major non-Chinese contender in the AI race releasing open-weight models. I’d rather trust that French weights haven’t been backdoored than Chinese ones. Heck, I’d even trust Mistral more than Anthropic for sensitive work.
You have a number of other European providers of open-weight LLMs, such as Bielik and Aleph Alpha. They are not trying to compete at the frontier, but they sometimes develop original architectures. I am also a big fan of PleIAs' research in this regard, have a look at their Baguettotron
Bielik largely exists because, and this is also my own experience, even frontier models still make grammar/spelling mistakes in Polish - even more so now than in the past.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I certainly wouldnt have predicted that 10 years ago.
Very glad to see Mistral still in the game even after some big stumbles with Large 3. I deeply hope that this model is 'good enough' that it becomes the European go-to, giving them the resources to keep the pace up.
I'm excited to try this out today.
Deepseek essentially releases instruction manuals in paper form.
This will cause the picked winner to get massively ahead with sheer compute alone used both for training and inference dedicated to recursive self improvement.
The government that removed restrictions on how private companies can access capital after a certain scale (the JOBS Act), that removed the need for private companies to report as if they were a public company after a shareholder threshold was crossed, superpowering the access of wealthy private investors to get in earlier in a growing company while at the same blocking the public from participating in funding growing enterprises at an earlier stage (since it required companies to IPO much earlier to access capital) which allowed retail investors to also reap the rewards on funding them early when they grew to become behemoths (like Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Google, etc.).
It's not fair in either place, the USA has its own model of unfairness, China has a completely different one. The difference is that in the USA the government allows private investors to become more powerful than the State (outside of the monopoly of violence) while plunging the rest of society into increasingly more precarious lives while in China the State is the power and its legitimacy only exists while the population feel they have a better life.
I think the Chinese government is backing their labs by less direct means. For example cheap electricity and investing in chip manufacturers such as Huawei and cxmt.
Deepseek specifically, is known to operate with minimal resources. The entire company has around 160 employees and every model they release must break even within ten months.
Same goes for US labs, not everyone are as innovative as google deepmind:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...
Ironically your comment will be cloned and used for training.
Supporting deepseek is just like supporting the Chinese army, no need for that. Though it goes both ways, OpenAi subscription just lowers the cost of the US army as well.
It's not a subsidy for the Chinese to say they're going to ignore our IP laws. It's a subsidy for us to say we're going to make them and try to push them on the world. It's literally granting a monopoly by legal force. It's very obviously not aligned with the interests of the American people, while China releasing things in the open is.
Good, where do I sign up? At least they aren't exploding little children and generating chaos in the oil market.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/anthropi...
It may be that the effect of the backing in both places is essentially equal but this statement is strange. The Chinese government invests directly in Deepseek[1]. Notice the article, in addition to saying the CCP is investing, says Tencent is also a major backer. CCP owns a golden share of Tencent.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/deepseek-funding-round.html
There is as much to criticize about American hyper scalers and AI labs and the lack of interest in helping humanity or contributing to open source, but that might not be as popular an opinions on this site.
The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.
Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]
[0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...
Microsoft did not pay with money - it paid (mostly) with Azure cloud computing credits. MSOFT is then able to write this off as a loss against tax.
It is generally far more tax-efficient in the US to write a loss in this way than it is to write a loss for a cash investment.
In this case, I believe the difference was ultimately highly significant. When including MSOFT eventually writing-off the deprecating Azure hardware it had used to buy the OpenAI equity, the result was MSOFT's tax reduction being either close-to or exceeding the actual cash value of MSOFT's investment in OpenAI - IIRC.
These examples represent taxes that the US chooses not to collect - the US could choose to make investments like these less tax-efficient. Instead, by making them extremely tax-efficient, the US subsidises the transaction hugely.
Even ignoring monetary subsidies, there are the non-monetary ones: not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries, the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy, the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated.
That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
That isn't normally how enforcement works, and it hasn't been very long since they disclosed those breaches. If the victims want to pursue legal action, they can, and they still may!
> the slaps on the wrist for massive piracy
So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
> the waving of environmental (and other) regulations in order to allow their data centres to be built an operated
Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
That's just the ones i know off the top of my head in the US. Those programs account for more than 60 billion in committed spend.
> That's what I'm asking - which monetary subsidies?
I am listing for you the non-monetary subsidies, which are just as real and equally important.
> not being sued into oblivious by the government for their countless hacks of other companies and countries
If it was one of the Chinese labs doing this hacking, the government would be stepping in. If it was European labs they'd be stepping in. If it was you or I the government would be stepping in. That is a massive subsidy (they don't have to worry about the same legal fees and exposure) and being allowed to continue doing business is in fact priceless.
> So judges and juries are involved in the subsidization conspiracy, too?
There is no conspiracy. They are objectively operating by a different set of rules than you or I could operate in this market.
> Sure, though if you think this isn't happening in China too, I have a bridge to sell you.
I never said it wasn't, I'm saying that it's happening here and it's a very real subsidy.
Not arbitrarily banning companies from buying a product from a supplier doesn't meet my definition of the term "subsidy".
[1] Where "Bad Things" would be the typical interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation plus the Anthropic specific employee compensation, LLM training (you know, for the LLM lab), revenue sharing agreements (which is a form of paying for infrastructure), etc.
For LLMs, marginal cost is just electricity
Non-punishment is also not a subsidy; again, words have meanings. Let's use the correct words.
DeepSeek is basically a research lab founded by a hedge fund guy, more than anything else.
There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.
A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.
If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.
It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.
The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.
I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.
It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.
But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.
This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.
Charity and kindness is not a motivation, it's an outcome of what you do.
Notwithstanding that Chinese publishing methods actually does help both humanity and open-source.
As a neutral party, this characterization is crazy.
As if the AI companies - Claude and OpenAI are guardians of freedom and humanity and very charitable to the global society without any self interests… “Chinese models are subsidized by the Chinese Government, therefore they’re inherently bad for humanity” is a highly propagandist argument. The politics of US vs China may be whatever it is in reality.. You have one company releasing their models for cheap, actually open sourcing their trained weights, and publishing details of their optimizations and learnings for others to use. The other camp actively “aligning” their models, nerfing their capabilities, hyping their swarm activities from poor sandboxes, and trying their best to lock users into their harnesses and walled platforms. They are subsidized by the capitalist VCs who are essentially waiting for their payouts..
At some point, one has to see things for what they are and evaluate their own reasoning..
I’m happy to stay provider agnostic, try all models and cheer any useful progress as open as possible.
Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.
Not even our leaders say China is an enemy, ita mostly businessmen who are scared of competition and trying to regulate chinese out of their markets so they can make more money milking us.
Yes, because everything China does is against the US. That's all they think about day and night. God forbid they want to corner the global market or have a genuine business case. How dare they provide options for those who can't afford a measly $200 a month? How can we let Chinese labs publish research for free for the whole world so that they can benefit? The nerve! To think they can use soft power instead of military might! I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are the last bastions of human kindness and charity. Right?
Right?
You think extremely US-centric. China has a different economic model than US and your rules for a specific kind of Capitalism may not apply to them. You assume a country of 1.4 Billion people is obsessed with a couple of foreign AI companies. What if they don't care.
Why are we assuming a strong US is necessarily good? As a European, I have seen plenty of evidence against that stance lately.
I understand that Americans might prefer a strong US. But conflating them with humanity is a leap that I don't think one can make without any backing.
We hear this about literally every industry the Chinese excel in - that it's only because the government subsidizes them that they succeed. For chip manufacturing, for batteries, for EVs, for solar, for AI. I don't see how the chinese government can afford to subsidize all of these industries and still have them contribute to the GDP.
Its very xenophobic of you to say China has zero intention of helping humanity, and just wants to "wage economic warfare".
Last time I checked, it was ourselves (USA) waging economic warfare on 2/3rds of the world.
I dont get this cope people have where people have this idea that its impossible for a Chinese company (that make billions of dollars) to have done something by their own merit, but instead its always some Chinese Communist Party conspiracy where the main goal is to destroy America.
Lay off twitter for a bit.
>Last time I checked, it was ourselves (USA) waging economic warefare on 2/3rds of the world.
Up until recently the USA Wasn't waging economic "warefare" on 2/3rds of the world
China is not a threat to you, or anyone in the West.
Its them who chose to outsource heavily, not US consumers.
There are no victims here however, both benefited from the arrangement. The consumers and capitalists.
So the most common way to publish manuals?
From the Mistral site:
> ML4 was trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral’s own datacenters in Europe.
It is pretty capital intensive!
To put that into context, the last wave of capacity SpaceXAI added 400-450 MW.
Disclaimer: I'm not sure how much of an IYKYK factor applies to this joke.
But Opus 5.5/GPT is such a game changer in comparison to sooo many others, its still a moat for now.
As for Mistral - I got really excited when they said Large 4 was focusing on being #1 in cybersecurity, because that's somewhere that they genuinely could edge out Anthropic & OpenAI. Have it actually solve problems, instead of Anthropic flagging "you tried to find a null pointer exception bug in your own code, we're now reporting you to the US government". But on the Mistral benchmarks I'm seeing, this looks very disappointing, but at least they haven't entirely given up. I genuinely thought Mistral had given up on new general models. They need to learn the bitter lesson all over again.
The capabilities of all models increasing so much all the time means there are simply less and less tasks you need a frontier model for.
Even if Opus 5.5 is 500x better than Deepseek, if deepseek can solve all my problems, why do I need to pay for more?
This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5. Well, mostly. It doesn't implement task switching yet; we'll see if it runs into a wall at some point. But it boots in QEMU, and it's running a user process in ring 3 and serving web pages.
But if on the other hand, I mostly use my human intelligence and just need a dumb model to complement my human intelligence at low cost and high speed (say review every commit to catch obvious bugs), I have a much better chance of building an actual moat than you do.
But outside of coding, it’s even more clear that you don’t need frontier intelligence. My customer service agent is very happy with a 100B param Deepseek flash model, thank you!
Obviously any model will do if you use it as a better autocomplete.
I believe that there is a large gap in expectations between different workflows.
Until the AI like reads my mind and produces perfectly production ready apps with minimal intervention from my side, there is still going to be room for improvement.
Look at the context in which I used that term 'good enough'.
What i was saying is that there are tasks for which a dumber model can be good enough, and for organizations with sovereignty/ privacy concerns, those concerns can be strong enough to incentivize the use of a dumber model.
I had the exact same experience. And unlike Fable, it doesn't gobble up your entire usage limit in a few hours.
I always wonder what the "good enough" people are actually using it for.
If Opus can’t 1-shot it, then it must rely on our human intelligence which can be complemented well enough with a dumb model as a frontier model.
People who aren't afraid of rolling their sleeves into any code base? The difference is practically zero.
This works fine with Opus 5.5. But it also works fine with GPT 6.1 Sol, Kimi K3 and MiMo 2.6 Pro.
It doesn't work equally well with Sonnet 5.5, interestingly.
Maybe it's because people stopped watching what their agents are doing and stopped looking at the quality of the output. But I still see agents being absolutely mindless like a junior dev.
Recent example: it updated an an API to add newly released models to the backend. There's a list of models that require specific configuration for the reasoning effort and temperature or the API call fails. GPT 6.1 Sol misses this and code fails at runtime because the newer models need to be added to the list for special handling of temp and reasoning. Fixes it for one model and tests it for that model using an E2E test. But doesn't test the other models that were added for the same error condition...I had to explicitly ask it to do so and it finds them and adds them to the list and says "that's on me."
Yeah, not that smart.
"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
And yes, open weights are still behind, but are catching up.
I use MiMov2.6Pro, DeepSeekv4.1Flash, GLM5.3, Hy4, Qwen3.8 and KimiK3 at home. Opus5.5 is not a game changer.
I have to admit, Sonnet got really good too.
But Opus just uses tools, a broad spectrum of it, etc. it feels like sure if you add some router behind it you could split it up if you need to but if you give me the choice, its opus allll day long.
The real question is if this model is good enough that it can still accelerate work, and not be a hindrance to real work like older Mistral models often were.
If they can do that, they'll have customers.
If these companies will steal from deep pockets like Disney or Sony (some of the most infamously litigious copyright trolls to ever exist), they won't think twice of stealing every bit of code you upload to them.
If your code passes through an AI company's servers, you can assume you just gave it to them. In turn, when your competitor tries to copy that new feature you just added, the AI is now trained in exactly how to copy you and eliminate your competitive edge. Unlike your employees, the AI isn't bound by the same rules and even if it were and violated them, your company probably doesn't have enough money to prove it in court (and that's if we somehow reverse some of the stupid "AI is the most transformative use of copyright I've ever seen" judges who have drunk the coolaid).
Most companies could build the compute to run GLM or Kimi models for way less than the potential loss due to IP theft from using third-party systems.
A simple loophole, use the code to create an RLVR environment where the resultant code is the end goal / max reward. Technically the customer data is never trained upon, but effectively you’re using it. Even better, use the code as a seed to generate synthetic data similar to it and use that synthetic data as rewards in an RLVR model.
Unless you can host the ChatGPT model on your own servers, which I know some enterprises are doing, I don’t think there’s any hope of protecting your data / competitive advantage from these frontier companies. Better to be paranoid, than be commodified by these companies.
It's especially the case as more non-Americans look to self hosted models and domestic cloud inference providers using open models that the US providers who are still leading the charge need to drastically drop their prices and find a path to profitability in order to maintain their lead and retain the advantage they had as AI turns into a commodity (which is happening faster than I think even the frontier labs initially predicted).
I hear this literally every other week about whatever the newest FoTM model is.
Unless you can provide concrete examples of things you can do with them that you simply couldn't do with last week's model, it's absolutely meaningless.
There is no ceiling on what you can accomplish with more intelligence, so there will always be a market for the best models, and that market is likely to just keep growing. If Opus 13.5 can one-shot a profitable company or discover a new disease treatment or whatever you can think of that a swarm of relentless super-geniuses could accomplish, companies (and governments) will throw money at it.
I also think there will always be a market for many sub-frontier models that will continue to grow rapidly as well, because "good enough" is definitely a thing for a given task.
No company would ever release such a thing
So it makes sense, since all you need is compute, that there's a ceiling and specialization is going to be more valuable then some super AGI.
Especially since the worst people seem to be the ones who think they'll all run away with the bag.
Obviously, this is only a valid question if you don't believe that open weights are about to eat their lunch and their revenue is about to collapse, or they're running a super unprofitable ponzi scheme propped up by investor money that's about to collapse like a house of cards. I don't find those positions credible at all though.
If you do, then this question isn't really for you, as I'm more interested in thoughts from those who think that OpenAI and Anthropic in particular are about to be the largest companies on earth in a couple years. Could anyone catch them at that point?
I don't know about revenue, but I suspect multiple other labs are already beating OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability. Staying on the frontier is expensive, and it's hard to recoup those R&D costs when you have a bunch of other labs nipping at your heels.
If you concede the previous point, then the only way for OpenAI/Anthropic to keep growing long term is to swallow the whole economy (i.e. mass job replacemnt), and that's a bet I wouldn't take.
If they can carve out a niche of industrial and governmental partners who rely on them for sovereignty reasons, it may be enough.
The second moat is convenience, which all the big labs make it (comparatively) easy to glide into their models.
Also strong on cyber benchmarks (better than all chinese models), so this is a good defender model.
Lots of people shitting of Mistral for no reason imo. These are pretty good numbers across the board. Definitely good enough to use as a daily driver over other llms, if you have moral qualms with the others. For certain use cases, like cyber security, this may be the go to model.
I like to make fun of europe, but there's lots for mistral to be proud about in this release imo.
-- My imagination of Europe when I was 15 living in Ohio
This is a good summary.
Well I'm european and... That Switzerland (Europe but not EU) has more companies in the Top 70 by market cap than the entire EU (Switzerland has two, the EU only has ASML) is kinda something that warrants making fun of.
That the biggest European software company is SAP, in 71th position is both sad and tragic: it shows how lame and irrelevant Europe is when it comes to software.
So Europe is nowhere in software and friggin nowhere in hardware: sure it's got ASML but ASML now has officially... Zero customer in Europe. Zero is not much.
Then Japan is at least trying to come back into the game with nano imprint litography. Europe is betting it all on AMSL (which anyway is majoritarily US-owned).
So software: nothing. Hardware: nothing besides ASML.
Overall the EU has six companies in the Top 100 by market cap and they're all, besides ASML, near the bottom of the Top 100.
We could also maybe make a bit fun of how the EU destroyed it's car industry (the main industry in Germany, which is the biggest economy of the union) by handing it all to chinese EVs?
Or what about the US warning the EU, years ago, to not become entirely dependent on Russia for energy? And EU not listening and then seeing its energy price skyrocket when the proverbial shit hit the fan? (Russia attacking Ukraine)
And we could, also, at least make a bit of fun of entire streets in cities like Paris and Brussels that used to have luxury shops and fancy restaurants that are all turned into places selling cheap kebabs? What a great success: I'm sure this one makes the komrades happy. It projects an image of grandeur and success: kebabs.
Or the constant attacks on free speech in the EU. Or the surveillance apparatus that's being put into place.
And let's not forget: there were promises made to Russia to never grow the EU to the east. Then the EU started exciting Russia by saying they'd incorporate Ukraine into the EU: I'm not against that but doing that did trigger a war. And now suddenly the EU is waking up and feeling all warmongering, wanting to dedicate a big percentage of its spending to weapons and tanks and missiles.
The warmongering tiny pet that the EU is is kinda laughable too.
At this point it's more like I don't know what is there left to not make fun of about my EU.
For what's going on is just sad, plain sad.
Edit: unfortunately, it's a question that voting does not really permit you to answer on this website.
When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.
Median wealth per adult has the USA at #28, below Italy, Spain, Slovenia, and Portugal.
USA 25th percentile 28k to 30k EU-27 50th percentile 24k to 26k.
Maybe you're just bitter?
I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.
> Maybe you're just bitter?
This comes off as psychological projection.
I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.
Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:
Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine
To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.
The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.
Not a very rigorous economic argument - besides they also don't share an immigration policy, nor a single currency (Denmark)
If it bears fruits and we build ``it'', everyone dies, which is par, also?
Take a look at NLNet vs YC. At NLNet, You set your milestones, do the work and get rewarded.
YC just throws money in the hopes one company is a unicorn. Both support growth, but they're not comparable at all.
And as you can probably tell by now, the first amendment in the US is not actually preventing the US government from promoting a specific religion or silencing speech. It's just words on a paper at this point. Look at the actual practice.
Several European countries do a much better job at protecting the rights described in the first amendment to the US constitution.
Also, at least here in Brazil, the way the constitution is amended is by patching it. For instance, our constitutional amendment number 115 (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/e...) patches article 5 of the constitution to add protection of personal data as a right. But we wouldn't talk about "amendment 115", we would instead talk about "article 5 item LXXIX of the constitution"; that is, what matters is the patched text, not the law that patched it.
I don't know about other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if they take a similar approach.
Freedom of speech.
> "Look at the actual practice."
The UK does not have that? The situation in the UK is very obtuse. It is confused.
The UK is not the world's biggest champion of free speech, but I think it's still doing better than the US right now.
This is Not Even Wrong.
(edit, terms the wrong way around)
That setting didn't seem to make any real difference - it added a tiny bit of thinking trace and high actually produced less output tokens than none.
The high bicycle frame is better then the none one though.
Pelicans: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
(Definitely the best I've seen from any Mistral model: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle+mist... )
Otherwise, behind on the broader Pareto frontier, but not by much (Vals Index: 48.05% vs. GLM-5.3’s 53.51%; $13.78 vs. $7.25 per test). Many companies will prefer it over Chinease models.
What would you consider a "correct" answer? I just asked deepseek-v4.1-flash asking it what happened (without mentioning the word "protest"; here are some excerpts of what it said:
> In April 1989, students in Beijing began demonstrations after the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party general secretary. The protests grew. [..] Estimates from other sources range from hundreds to several thousand deaths. [..] The Chinese government describes the events as a counter-revolutionary riot and says the military action was necessary to restore stability. It restricts public discussion of the events inside China. Many other governments, human rights organizations, and observers describe the events as a violent suppression of peaceful protests.
So, let's see... it calls it a "protest", mentions the number of deaths, and even mentions the censorship of the topic by the CCP.
I live in EU, use for my personal needs chinese models only, and don't plan to move to any of the ones allied with the Pentagon or its european counterparts.
Surely we want competition and Europe involved in that, but at this point I have grown used to either American labs smashing the frontier remarkably fast, or Chinese labs getting way, way closer than you would expect them to.
Mistral’s progress, regrettably, feels much slower. This model doesn’t knock anybody’s socks off. The model is (and I hate to be this harsh) mediocre, and this mediocrity has also arrived months late.
This is a pretty grim prognosis for European AI.
LLM development is jumpy. It’s hard to extrapolate very far ahead.
When Europe does surprise us, I will be the first to commend their progress. But until then, this is where we're at.
This is mistrals first 1T-scale model and I expect the 4th or 5th generation to be close to the best for many purposes.
[1] These evals differ from the public ones like terminal-bench, are sometimes model-specific, need real, diverse usage to actually create, and are held secretly since quality of eval is the first driver behind the next step improvement of a model.
[2] It is not close. This model was trained on less than 4k GPUs, whereas astra used north of 100k GPUs.
And to the point of scale and training cluster, so what? Not only do Chinese labs have smaller clusters with less empowered GPUs, compute is Mistral's responsibility. You can't take away from other labs just because they fulfill that responsibility better.
AI needs big bucks, and Mistral is Europe’s Anthropic.
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/
Mistral would have gotten a tiny and measly "EU grant" and ASML would never have invested later had it not been for the US VCs.
Europe needs profitable AI companies, not money pits.
A lot of European companies now want a model the US can't cut off, but also lack trust in Chinese models.
Some of these will self host Mistral but most will pay them by the token. It's not going to be a huge market or a huge margin within that market but probably it'll be enough.
I'm not actually sure Tesla is a great company from any perspective so should be easy to find another sick burn for them.
Google is going to be a little more difficult. Maybe say something nasty about advertising? Or go for the monopoly angle.
AI is a strategic technology with obvious national security implications. EU should invest in its development whether it's currently profitable or not.
…oh…wait…
That's not particularly great.
That said I love that they don't seem to restrict cyber capabilities to any degree and even lean into it.
If the best model for cyber attacks is open for everyone to use it just makes us all safer I think. Of course you then also HAVE to use it or otherwise you're vulnerable, which is a great distribution play.
People usually buy the cheapest, like Deepseek or GLM or they spend on Anthropic/OpenAI subs.. Are these models in the middle getting any users?
On a side note, I wonder if this was the popular free Space Bunny model that left openrouter yesterday.
I barely use anything outside of cheap Chinese models on OpenRouter anymore. They are simply (more than) good enough for most of the things I do.
This model looks reasonably cheap. Though not deepseek levels.
Going to test it with Hermes, wondering where it will land in term of capability.
Bon chance, Mistral!
The pricing ($.68 in/$.07 cached/$2.09 out) makes it much cheaper than Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, and Meta Muse Spark 1.3. That's great!
But also much more expensive than GLM 5.3-flash and Spark 1.3 Contributor (the Meta-takes-your-data pricing of Spark 1.3).
So, I think it would have to be significantly better than GLM 5.3-flash to be worth it. GLM 5.3-flash is already very good.
After that, it will be much closer to GLM 5.3, but you can also get 5.3 in their API! I dont see people really talking about that.
Source https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mistral-large-4?total-c...
Tais-toi et prends mon argent!
I guess lots of token usage.
> The pace of progress from here will be fast. Stay tuned.
Investors looking for them to make monopoly profits are going to be disappointed The premium they can extract from consumers for their models will be capped. Tokens are likely to remain close to the cost of compute, a cost which is high but falling fast.
Also, yay Europe! Although the comparison between this and mimo 2.6 is not flattering...
GLM-5.3: 753B, 40 Active
I was hoping for something that hinted at smaller models too, but I guess not.
Any competition is still good, especially now that the USA AI labs are starting to do regulatory capture.
Good enough to show competence, and instill confidence in the team/company. Later releases can be more efficient.
I think it's a great release with that framing.
https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/model-selection-guide?mode...
Cost is stated at half the price of GLM-5.3, which is quite interesting.
Maybe I didn't really select mistral 4? Either way, failed completely on question 1 and the next 2 questions were completely off base too. I didn't bother to finish.
Not suitable for my purposes I don't think.
Why isn't this on openrouter yet? Is there a better router that gets models much quicker?
1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org/
> This is particularly important in cybersecurity, where provider-level refusals can block legitimate vulnerability research and incident response, and where losing access to a capability mid-incident can itself become a critical security risk. ML4 pairs top-tier cyber performance with open weights and self-deployment, giving organizations both the capability and the autonomy to run advanced security work under their own policies.
> That top score reflects a practical advantage. Several leading closed models, including Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, score near zero on the same test because they refuse to perform the task. Yet defending software often starts with proving that a flaw is real, exactly the kind of work safety filters in closed models can block. This matters even more as threat actors increasingly jailbreak those same models to support offensive cyber activity
> "Try it today" > > There is still more to come. As we work toward releasing the weights, we will share further details on the model architecture, additional benchmarks, and our post-training methodology.
It's just that the open-weights aren't yet available (although the long delay is slightly annoying).
I estimate it's coding ability on par with opus 4.6 (but opus definitely beats it on factual knowledge) Still it's a genuinely useful model, when everything else except Anthropic's models (and for only 3 weeks after it came out Google's Gemini 3 pro, before it got merged) are not to me.
I'd live to have one like that but EU made.
I'm assuming you need somewhere 0.5 to 1TB of RAM for the weights only
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/
If one were to be cynical one could say that it's intentionally making Mistral's result look better than it actually is by making it harder to compare the bar heights.
Honestly just nice to see a leader in this space not take themselves so seriously.
also they forgot muse spark at 75% while claiming they were outshining all US models?
also the benchmarks are not necessarily indicative of how well the model will perform in its own harness with its own skills.
Second point
https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/vals_index
Mistral slightly proving me wrong (and I'm not mad).
It is of vital strateigic importance for Europe (and really the rest of the world too) that there are non-American, non-Chinese options for AI.
I realised after writing this, the EU as is uncomfortably often the case, may be the real forcing function for what happens with US policy irrespective of the media campaigns we're presently seeing. Here's hoping for a steady trickle of stale ChatGPT weights leaking from EU infra providers in the long term.
Specialists are expensive everywhere. China is functionally 80s Japan surrounded by several Brasils and all the frontier AI work is being done in that first part, where labour is expensive - if only due to competition for top talent.
Yes, if the Chinese stop trading, you can still use the existing solar panels (unlike the gas which you literally set on fire), but it's nonetheless a major vulnerability to not have any local know-how in creating important infrastructure.
Giving up all AI know-how and expertise to China just because they currently share their models would be a generational mistake.
Europe already got burned hard by this sort of thing too recently, and is now very sensitive to strateigic depencencies, and is working hard to lift them where possible.
And I dont mean actual trade stopping in the case of AI. The CCP could ban the release of Open Weight models tomorrow without running afoul of a single trade treaty
Having a third option significantly lowers the leverage that both China and the USA have over other countries.
Important for sovereignty, multi-language support, and choice.
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.
> 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.
And if not, why do they exist?
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.
Not everyone is wild about being downstream of either the Chinese or US governments, particularly when it comes to things like cybersecurity
Wouldn't it be better to do something more like Cursor, and RL on an existing pretrained model if you're not innovating anyway?
And if not, why do they exist?