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.
Btw: with Qwen4 I mean the next large Qwen model that is based on the Qwen4 architecture (Qwen 3.8 flash next was "almost" based on the new arch but obviously was a small model)
What matters more is if firm’s start using a bundle of American and Chinese models and when they find their feet - how large is the market for frontier?
Frontier has to displace labour one for one at some point or it’s over.
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.
There's a law of diminishing returns at play here, and doubling the energy cost of training to wring 2% more performance out of the technology isn't going to be very useful, because most of the problems it is capable of solving will be solvable with the previous-gen 98%-as-good model.
("there's a law of diminishing returns at play here" is an article of faith. But then, so is the belief that these models will keep getting better).
lol You can always tell who has never ran a business before with comments like this
Sorry man but you guys are delusional - you can’t even reason properly.
(I don't think it will work).
Are there any use cases that have enabled one customer of a frontier LLM to outperform a competitor using a different frontier LLM? Or is this why we are seeing confected points of comparison like solving challenge problems in mathematics?
There are going to still be worthwhile improvements but they are going to be more like not how to make transformers 10x cheaper but how to make next training run cost 9 trillions instead of 10 with a very particular optimization designed at the cost of hundreds of millions for this one specific run.
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.
As a differentiator from the Chinese system, not so much. For two otherwise equal companies, the one that says things against the party line will experience selective enforcement too.
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.
Yes, just that. Being a huge supporter of the regime - at a time running a department - surely has nothing to do with it.
... You're saying this about _deepseek_?
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...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/06/israeli-atta...
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-presents-assessmen...
I want you to publicly say that this turtle biologist and this journalist are Hamas: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/20/mona-khalil-tu... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/lebanon-journa...
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
Everything a Chinese company does has the explicit backing of the CCP, at least ideologically and usually financially in some fashion. While DeepSeek may not be the CCP, it couldn't exist if it was expressing any kind of ideology that wasn't inline with them and, in this case, is explicitly funded by them.
A Chinese company has no freedom to say Taiwan is a country the way someone in the US could suggest California succeed from the nation.
Any public message you hear coming out of China has the implicit approval of the Chinese government.
If you're not arguing about comparison then don't state this as if it's any different from the US. Because you make it sound that way. Or do you think that if tomorrow OpenAI came out vocally supporting the DSA - that suddenly they wouldn't see lots of barriers rise up out of nowhere?
Come on now. That's fairy tale land.
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.
Any open weights model that Chinese companies are releasing for free are allowing everyone in the world to have access to high quality realizations of these tools without the risk of the US regime arbitrarily cutting you off.
Also, it's funny how all the neoliberal mantras of how free market drives progress through competition stops when it's a US company that's being challenged.
Do you think the world is closer to or more distant from large scale global conflict today than it was 10 years ago, or even 3 years ago?
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.
They really aren't. Nothing in the development of these systems, absolutely nothing, is as important as money. Stop these silly false equivalences.
Not arbitrarily banning companies from buying a product from a supplier doesn't meet my definition of the term "subsidy".
I don't see how. Anyone can buy electricity without any intervention from the government. An intervention is an action that changes what would happen by default.
[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
Assuming you meant to reply to me and not someone else are you saying under GAAP accounting standards Anthropic is a profitable business because under GAAP accounting their only expense is electricity?
(I see what happened you skimmed the conversation and didn't follow what was being discussed.)
Non-punishment is also not a subsidy; again, words have meanings. Let's use the correct words.
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.
Causing less content to be uploaded, when you are clearly the gorilla in the room, looks to be a wise strategy not a trade off.
DeepSeek is basically a research lab founded by a hedge fund guy, more than anything else.
To say that US model providers have a close relationship with their government would be putting it mildly.
It is great for everyone except for a few people who want power over everyone else, and the fact it is not charity of kindness makes it more sustainable, because charity and kindness is quick to go when big money and politics is involved.
I want more warfare like this. Building stuff instead of destroying stuff.
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.
Notwithstanding that Chinese publishing methods actually does help both humanity and open-source.
Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.
So were Amazon and Uber by the US, which have now established monopolies across the globe. To the countries suffering from those, there's zero difference with China doing it to solar. Actually there is, at least solar got them cheap renewable energy in return. This would never have happened in the US because big oil interests would make it take decades. That's the reality.
You need to spend 10 years outside the US, deprogram, and then go back.
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?
US companies are burning colossal piles of cash in ways that makes it unclear if it qualifies as dumping, not to mention their deep ties with the country's regime.
Claiming that companies from a country have ties to the regime and burn through cash is a very miopic accusation.
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.
Charity and kindness is not a motivation, it's an outcome of what you do.
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.
Ok, but so what? That's what happening so far. Even a repressive totalitarian government I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy does some good sometimes.
If the Chinese cheap/open models rise up and destroy us, thats on us for giving them access to the tools to do so.
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.
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.
No, it's the result of US leadership letting this happen. This is clear since China themselves would not let this happen. US leadership did nothing because they were best friends with the people who did it, and did not care one bit about their population.
If the singularity is defined as an AI sufficiently intelligent to improve itself independently, that AI is still limited by the resources required to do this improvement.
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!
Chinese companies also managed to put together their models with relatively small clusters.
Perhaps US companies are desperately trying to brute force their way into workable models?
To put that into context, the last wave of capacity SpaceXAI added 400-450 MW.
This appears to be roughly as good as Sol 6.1 (which is quite good), considerably faster in terms of wall clock for complete tasks, and considerably cheaper (where Sol 6.1 is already good value - just really slow).
That seems too good to be true...
But I really hope it is true...
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?
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.
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.
I have enough real problems in life. I don't need to invent new ones just because a new technology is available.
Many of my problems in life are fully solved far past my satiation point by a 3b model that costs me nothing to run.
Many others are not.
But in either case, when I am acting and living wisely, almost all of my problems exist prior to the existence of technological solutions to those problems.
This is also true for the customers and employers that I care to work with. This has changed in me over time, but I now try my best to avoid inventing new problems. The world has enough big, important problems already.
> This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5.
This is cool but also a good example. I don't need a personalized microkernel just because it's possible to have one.
Maybe I need one and I don't know it, but the problem statement definitely isn't "I have inherent desire for a personalized microkernel".
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!
I’m using subscription models for exactly that, better models catch more subtle bugs, and they catch them faster. It works out far better in terms of work-hours saved.
Also A/ then OAI slashed token pricing by 2x~5x on their latest models
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.
For people who have some expertise, the models accelerate the grunt work, but you’re the one validating it.
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.
I keep seeing this kind of thing over and over, and honestly it's not got _that_ much better since the big breakthroughs about a year ago.
For sure I happily vibecode stuff without worrying about it when it's a greenfield project, and if the LLM has written it entirely from scratch then usually it's well structured and sane. But making changes in messy, mostly human-written mature codebases is still a minefield.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
Disclaimer: I'm not sure how much of an IYKYK factor applies to this joke.
I trust them and their populations to provide a more societal-friendly version of AI, putting pressure on the US tech oligarchy, while also providing democracy-friendly open models that I don't trust to happen with the Chinese labs.
Mistral is also an European company. As we live in a time where the US regime is engaged in pyrrhic geopolitical tactics, it's good to know that it can't threaten to cut access to models during s period where everyone is rushing to incorporate them more and more in our life.
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.
AI is an idea 60 years old. We are on the 3rd or 4th generation of AI development. Three years into the current iteration of products.
This is not early days by any measure. LLMs are a result of a very, very mature research field.
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.
PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.
It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.
-- My imagination of Europe when I was 15 living in Ohio
Problem is that we thought the US was 'cool', with US movies, music, digital services, cooler than our own and thus we helped give the US the lead. The US has lost it's coolness though, now we just think it's creepy.
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.
The president also didn't ban the media - he just didn't allow them in the Whitehouse. This is something we're rightly concerned about and pushing back on.
The UK on the other hand, does ban ordinary speech by ordinary people in their homes. It's orders of magnitude worse than the United States, as any cursory examination would show.
> The president also didn't ban the media - he just didn't allow them in the Whitehouse. This is something we're rightly concerned about and pushing back on.
That's still a ban. It's interfering with the media's ability to report on the government. It's great that you're concerned, but it's still happening.
> The UK on the other hand, does ban ordinary speech by ordinary people in their homes.
In their homes? Do you have examples?
I've never heard of anyone in the UK getting in trouble for criticising the government; it seems to be a time honoured tradition there. Whereas in the US, they now check your social media at the border and might not let you into the country if you've said anything critical of the president.
And there's also the censorship on science, which is every bit as serious as the crackdown on government criticism.
This is Not Even Wrong.
(edit, terms the wrong way around)
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.
16 is still not good enough. That being said none of the 4 companies from Switzerland are in software and hardware. ABB is maybe the closest (data center electricity).
Also Switzerland is a very very rich country. Neutral.
Also other countries like Germany has a lot of small companies that are world leaders in their field. That’s part of Germanys resilience.
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.
20 years ago this was not the case. The minimum wage in some parts of the US is now higher than the average wage in most of Europe.
The US has a population that will always struggle to survive without government assistance. Per multiple US statistical agencies that is about 10-15% of households.
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.
No, sorry, it isn't. People commonly use the phrase "has money" to refer to income in American English.
Again, the deal with the US is that the rich live better and the poor live worse. Or put another way; people who make money get to keep more, and people who don't make money are given less.
Because there are so many more people who have money, and because those people like living comfortably, available healthcare and education is world class. Make sure not to read that as "All healthcare and education", it's "available healthcare and education".
Generally people who are earning a lot don't care as much about vacation, but every white collar job will generally give at least a standard 15 days off and 10 holidays. Ironically as you move up you are generally given more vacation while actually using less.
Americans don't have vacation in the same way Scandinavian countries don't have a minimum wage. Even the most left-leaning States in the US have not written it into law because it is effectively addressed by custom. Americans are sufficiently happy with it that vacation isn't a political topic.
Middle class people from wealthy nations who move to poor countries are relatively rich by the standards of their new country. Middle class people from poor countries who move to rich countries are relatively poor by the standards of their new country.
I didn't say it'd be easy. I'm just pointing out that only one of the two groups being discussed has a real choice in the matter.
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?
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.
Very few Americans have any experience about how life is in Europe, while the contrary is much more common.
I'll just say that I don't think the reason is a lack of knowledge and leave it here.
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.
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: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.
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.
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... )
claude-opus-5: Lantern
claude-opus-5-5: Lantern
claude-fable-5-1: Lantern
claude-fable-5: Lantern
gemini-3.8-flash: Zephyr
gemini: Petrichor
qwen3.5-dashscope: Zephyr
glm-5.1: Lantern
gpt-6-astra: Lantern
grok-4: octopus
mimo-v2.5-pro: Breeze
minimax-m2.5: serendipity
kimi2.6-or: Gossamer
grok-4.20: luminescent
deepseek-v4-flash: serendipity
deepseek-v4-pro: Endurance
deepseek-chat: Serendipity
The more banal your prompt is, the more banal the output is going to be. People have been testing LLMs with little things like “write a short fantasy story,” for years now and most of the stories are exactly what you’d expect: prosaic drivel.
I call this “generic in, generic out,” an LLM corollary to the classic GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out.”)
- Pelican cycling to the right - that's been discussed at length, images of bicycles online always show that side of the bike because that's where the chain is.
- Bicycle is usually red. No idea! Red ones go faster?
Both are riding on the left side of the path for some reason.
> Create a cartoon pelican riding a bicycle. Need SVG only output.
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.
I think it's an incomplete read. What's the point in competing for a sizeable percentage of your funding when the finish line is incrementally being moved each month? Better spend it on leapfrogs which they seem to have done.
Meanwhile Mistral have a natural ace in their pocket with respect to regulation in the form of CADA and the Cloud Sovereignty Framework. I can't think of another company that would qualify as SOV-3 under that regime
Sometimes it's ok to cheer for the last kid crossing the finish line because they're actually running a totally different race, and winning might look completely different.
When I look at what Mistral does vs other organizations I'm impressed:
They aren't profitable yet, but they're a lot closer than most and they're doing a hell of a lot with very little.
Pointless racing story:
I was in high school track with a really tough guy who was just not a runner. We went to a pretty messed up high school and if you screwed around in track practice sometimes the coach would make you run a crap race at the next meet, like steeplechase or hurdles. Well this guy and a few others screwed up and coach made them all run hurdles at a meet.
He hooked every single one and fell on his face. Every time he got back up and kept on running. By the time he hit the finish line his knees were bleeding halfway down to his ankles. We cheered like hell and he was smiling ear to ear.
Coach quit punishing us with races after that.
But Chinese models have very much earned their place. The same cannot be said of Europe, so far.
I really want them to win as that's our last horse in the AI race, but ~200 research-oriented devs out of 1800 employees? I believe they agree it's pretty doomed and have pivoted.
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.
The lack of compute is not really attributable in that sense to mistral. First of all it needs general investor and government willingness, which is easier in a larger economy like the US or China.
Second, you need widespread usage of your paid inference service for two reasons: one it pays off your compute cost, and two it speeds up the improvement process.
The vast majority of deepseeks paid customers are within china itself (since openai and anthropic services are not reachable from china) which gives it a market. But for someone in france, there is no reason to use a structurally slower developing model from mistral compared to using one from openai...except when data guarantees are needed, hence the landing page focus on sovereignty. As far as the dual use aspect goes, a model like this is more than enough, so the government will be happy.
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lechonk_(Pok%C3%A9mo...
I've read it a few times and I always processed it as "Le Chateau Fat" ("The fat castle"), which I guess also kinda works. I guess it is mostly because my french is so rusty I forgot (or maybe never learned?) what chaton meant.
AI needs big bucks, and Mistral is Europe’s Anthropic.
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.
> Europe will never have a Tesla, a Google or an Amazon with that mindset.
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.
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.
Inte Cost
llig per
Open Weight model ence Speed Task
Mimo-V.26-Pro 46 47 $0.13
GLM-5.3 (max) 45 73 $2.01
DeepSeek 4.1 Flash Max 39 227 $0.27
Mistral Large 4 Preview 38 116 $1.13Recently I switched to the Mistral hosted GLM-5.3, this worked very well and powered through a tonne of work. Unfortunately, I also completely maxed out two subscriptions within the space of six days this month. One can't stack subscriptions with Mistral, so I'd have to register a third account for another subscription, which will be annoying with changing API keys all the time. Sure I can switch to pay-as-you-go API, but that adds up really fast. The Mistral dashboard shows that a Vibe CLI monthly subscription for €18.44 actually provides €255 worth of API use (apparently, and I tried to check this with Support but it seems like they were intentionally vague).
After maxing out my Mistral subs this morning, I dropped $10 on Xiaomi to try MiMo-2.6. So far so good, seem to have done a lot of work for the $2.85 I've spent, and Xiaomi prices are still much better than the Mistral introductory offer for Le Chonk.
What to do, what to do.....
People usually buy the cheapest, like Deepseek or GLM or they spend on Anthropic/OpenAI subs.. Are these models in the middle getting any users?
On a side note, I wonder if this was the popular free Space Bunny model that left openrouter yesterday.
Guess what Mistral themselves do?
Soon we'll have Mistral 6 Chaton, Mistral 6 Guépard, Mistral 6 Tigre, Mistral 6 Dents-de-sabre, Mistral 6 Beast King, etc.
I barely use anything outside of cheap Chinese models on OpenRouter anymore. They are simply (more than) good enough for most of the things I do.
This model looks reasonably cheap. Though not deepseek levels.
Going to test it with Hermes, wondering where it will land in term of capability.
Bon chance, Mistral!
This was the era of the AI race I was waiting for.
The pricing ($.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...
All things considered I'm more inclained to pay for EU-based AI in the end (supporting local company and most likely being more aligned with EU regulations…)
GLM 5.3 is incredible because for the first time with an open-source model, it feels.. enough. I don't need much anymore, this model is great in everything. Except a thing : speaking french.
If the benchmarks are true, I'd be glad to switch entirely to Mistral.
> The RL run behind this preview is still in flight and shows no sign of saturation -- we will release a final version before the end of the month along with the weights of the model.
For example, there's something about Anthropic's picked design and their little Claude avatars that's unsettling to me.
(Especially the way it looked ~12 months ago -- it's gotten more cluttered since then. Perhaps unavoidably, as the breadth of their offerings has grown)
But over time it's begun to feel like unsettling cognitive dissonance as their ambitions grow and the stuff to worry about has piled up.
By this you sourely don't mean the messages shown in Claude Code, where Pi would show "Working..."
Academic style: Cooking... Sautéeing... Julienning... and similar annoying faux-brogrammer moody status messages.
Have Google's models achieved the ability to throw shade?
Some more than others
Tais-toi et prends mon argent!
I guess lots of token usage.
All things considered I'm more inclained to pay for EU-based AI in the end (supporting local company and most likely being more aligned with EU regulations…)
Mistral doesn't publish the science.
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.
> The pace of progress from here will be fast. Stay tuned.
You'd be surprised how much of the AI world is fueled by memes.
https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/model-selection-guide?mode...
Cost is stated at half the price of GLM-5.3, which is quite interesting.
Why isn't this on openrouter yet? Is there a better router that gets models much quicker?
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.
The weird thing is how worse they are at things like coding than other open weights. You'd expect them to at least distill coding from other open weights to match them.
Give them more compute!
> 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
How are they training without pirating the Z library corpus and all that?
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.
> "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).
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.
* proceeds to not compare to Opus 5.5
Also 1T-A49B. Weights currently closed but promise to open source them by the end of the month.
Great release movie.
OpenAI's therapist: Le Chaton Fat isn't real and cannot hurt you
Le Chaton Fat:
Mistral slightly proving me wrong (and I'm not mad).
also they forgot muse spark at 75% while claiming they were outshining all US models?
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?