Got curious, sign up, add money to account, try to use. Can't, it's a labs model. Fine, let's enable labs. Can't, unspecified error. Fine, lets contact customer support as instructed, can't no customer support, just a half-assed FAQ, that seems vibe-coded and searched poorly, totally irrelevant answers coming up for all queries tried. Then it hit me:
If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
No one ever thought it made good customer support. It makes cheap customer support, and quite a lot of companies already have shitty customer support because they don't care about it being good, so they're thrilled to get to cut costs further.
It's "good" from the perspective of a company that's annoyed to have to spend money on actually fixing things.
I laughed and cried at this comment. It's so uncannily EU. Just spent 18 months landing an EU enterprise contract. Signed today and sent it back and got an automated message 'sorry will be on vacation til end of July...' This is the fourth vacation emails I got since corresponding with this contact window for the past 1 year.
It's absolutely possible for individual employees to have generous vacations, while at the same time maintaining a continuously staffed support function.
Eh, Europe has some great service cultures. (There was a recent comment citing an article contrasting its furniture and tech industries I’m having trouble finding.)
European tech’s service culture is just distinctly and notoriously terrible, even within Europe.
The fact that you ignore the core of what I said and deflected with distraction is quite telling.
I agree with you, but the point was not anything about work life balance; it was about not being selfish, self centered, narcissistic; realizing that others may not have the ability or are not going on vacation at that given time and there should always be someone, especially in a kafkaesque type bureaucracy as Germany, who can assist in accomplishing whatever horrific bureaucratic control mechanism must be suffered to accomplish basic things.
My point was about continuity, not you talking about your vacation to rationalize the abuse of others who are not going on vacation but whose life you impact by your absence and lack of continuity, someone else not being able to competently perform your role in your absence, making them have to wait for your return from your work life balance vacation. It’s just narcissism, the disgusting mentality I called out and you reacted to.
> the abuse of others who are not going on vacation but whose life you impact by your absence and lack of continuity
That’s the point - this doesn’t matter and work is organized so that people can go home guilt free.
Coworkers should be able to take over; managers are responsible for coordinating vacation time, training and handovers. The customers are free to switch companies.
Talk about narcissism. You don't want anyone to have any guilt even when they adversely and negatively affect others.
How about this, you don't put others in a bind or adversely affect them if you don't want actual guilt, regardless of whether you want to feel it or not. This is the kind of messed up mentality that I was saying is so prevalent across Europe, if not narcissism, very much narcissistic in nature... I don't care about anything or anyone else but me and my vacation/time off.
And no, please don't try to distract with the red herrings. I am not advocating for employees to be abused; there is in fact a middle ground which I am advocating for, where if you want "guilt free feelings" ... DON'T BE GUILTY of abusing others by not caring about your responsibilities towards them.
It does still apply to companies, which, if you have some standing, let alone paid relationship with; have a duty to engage in that relationship. But I am also mostly talking about the bureaucracy, since that is in fact the OP topic, bureaucratic entitled narcissists simply just leaving others in a lurch because they go on a month long vacation, literally causing and costing damages and financial loss to someone.
> I am not advocating for employees to be abused; there is in fact a middle ground (…) DON'T BE GUILTY of abusing others by not caring about your responsibilities towards them.
My point is that the responsibility of the employer towards the employee (to allow time for vacation) has priority over the responsibilities of the employee towards the customer. It’s not the employee that failed you, it’s the employer. The employee cannot stay at work and the employer is responsible for providing replacement.
> narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others
This has to be rage bait right? What kind of hellscape do you live in where other humans taking vacation and wanting that to be respected is selfish? And how do you not realize the irony in what you're complaining about? Do you never take a vacation where you actually disconnect from your work?
I am German living in Germany and yes, I think not organizing a holiday replacement when you leave for more than a week is a sign of negligence and indifference; but unfortunately, it becomes more and more common to behave in that way. Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders. I'd like to declare these ~10 weeks "individual contribution weeks" in which no one is allowed to do anything that needs the coordination of more than two persons.
it's because there is no incentive in general in EU to be excellent at your job. good or bad, you get the same pay, and dont get compensated for bringing extra value to the company
Obviously untrue, any place on earth you get rewarded for being better at your job, either directly by being promoted or after asking/getting a higher salary, or indirectly by being able to change jobs by outright being better. This is true in most sectors, especially in software where it's really easy to switch jobs if you have the slightest amount of brain power.
Where are all these misconceptions come from? And how are they so far from reality they don't even pass the slightest of critical thinking?
As a software engineer that has worked in multiple German companies I can tell you that it’s not the case, or at least in Germany. If you do an amazing job, they would praise you and give you a promotion with 2% salary increase and more work. To add salt to the I wound, your colleague that has been on paternity leave for 3 months and on sick leave for 4 months would get the same salary increase
You are in Germany … and not the island you came from. Maybe consider not being such an entitled ingrate, regardless of how messed up the system may be.
You have something that is way beyond what you are deserve or, frankly, is acceptable. You should maybe just enjoy and be grateful for what you do have that others were betrayed so you can have it, not what you believe you should be even more entitled to have that belongs to others you’ve taken it from.
I presume you are free to return to your island if you object?
Do you think those things are all because of "there is no incentive in general in EU to be excellent at your job"? How on earth is all these things you're complaining about related? You're seemingly only interested in listing what you think EU does wrong, but none of your arguments are connected, why don't you write one proper comment instead of this trash you're sharing currently?
I’m not sure if you meant it, but it is indeed the EU, or what it represents and its purpose to suffocate excellence that is at the very core of this matter.
But the pay does not actually matter either, people can and do excel in spite of pay and even time in many places in Europe and the world. What you are probably inadvertently lamenting is the very purpose of the EU, the underlying mechanism that exists in other packaging like “communism”, but whose underlying mechanisms, the machine underneath the cladding is really just management and suppression of the parasitized masses.
They don’t want you to excel, because you excelling scares the ruling class cabal because you may exceed them. That is at least until they can get their own kind into place and control everything like in the US, then they’ll support this fake narrative of excellence that is prevalent in the US, but is really an illusion, a fraud really, like most other things in the U.S. where nothing is what it is said or implied to be.
I was referring to (mostly) internal projects in "German Mittelstand". Some of them with external partners. Customers might have the same problem, though, if they rely on the expertise of a single specialist. Regular customer support is usually available 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, but that's not what I was referring to. They usually don't manage projects.
What are you talking about? I was referring to German companies where we don't have proper holiday replacements for internal projects, as well as for those with external partners.
> Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders
That's what, less than 8 weeks, in a year of 52 weeks, where things progress slower, and this is supposedly a big issue? And even if you know and understand that these other people are humans too, just like you, this is seen as "narcissism" and "selfishness", that they take vacations in the summer?
I'm sorry but this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest? I understand your point of view when we talk about huge corporate entities with thousands of employees, but even SMBs with like 200 employees end up in a situation where people with specific jobs will have to be unavailable for weeks (as again, they're human just like you) and you can't realistically hire people to replace those for just some weeks.
It might be a minor contributor, but it sure isn't the reason.
If you do do much admire economic success through suffering, can I assume that you have relocated to China? (mainland) Because they sure know a thing or two about that...
if you think the status quo is sustainable, and that Europeans can live a luxurious life fueled by cheap Chinese workers...
> BERLIN, June 26 (Reuters) - Volkswagen is considering shutting four German factories and ramping up job cuts to as many as 100,000, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday, in what could be the biggest ever overhaul in the industry.
I very much agree, the status quo is not sustainable. But I really don't believe that the solution is trying to one-up China in whatever they are doing, or the USA, for that matter.
You are both missing the target. It's far too complex to fully elaborate on here, but suffice it to say that Europe has broken an iron triangle of choices, which not only limits the number of concurrent choices possible, but also require a minimum of choices to be sustainable.
Besides the whole AI thing, what exact "tech capability" is missing in EU or Europe today? Most things been preferable to get from the US as workers are generally abused there for profits, so been cheaper, but capability still exists in Europe and is ramping up. Do you have any specific examples or you're just on the typical anti-EU HN tirade so many of you seem to fall into as soon as EU is even slightly related?
What I wrote: "not organizing a holiday replacement when you leave for more than a week is a sign of negligence and indifference"
What you read: "taking vacations in the summer is 'narcissism' and 'selfishness' (...) these other people are humans too, just like you... this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest?"
I rest my case, thank you. Also, 2.5 months are closer to 11 weeks than 8 weeks, but you don't seem to care about a sincere discussion anyways.
Is not rage bait even if it enrages you to hear the truth. It’s rather funny how the narcissists come streaming out of the woodwork when you call them out. But I understand it, narcissists have no ability to instant their own nature, i.e. they wouldn’t be narcissists. It’s an inescapable conundrum and paradox.
You rather typical deflection and distraction does not change any of what I said and you ignored in typical fashion. Humans taking a vacation is great and I fully support it and wish more Americans could take more vacations, but that’s a different topic you’re distracting with.
The selfish and narcissistic aspect is that of the subject post, lack of continuity, especially in a bureaucracy that affects others’ lives. It’s the simplest and most obvious form of narcissism. The fact that you are either unable to see it and are deflecting from it is rather revealing.
It is abrasive, selfish, and narcissistic to lack all ability to comprehend that other people’s lives should not be made dependent on whether one person is it is not on vacation. Is literally the height of selfishness … “I don’t care about anyone else or my impact on them”
Is this a joke you're attempting? You're raging out about someone else being so narcissistic for not letting you continue on with your whole entire life because they took a vacation?
What is ironic about that? There is nothing ironic about that. That's just you inverting and making stuff up out of narcissistic tendencies to deflect from the uncomfortable truth.
One person affecting the life of another out of selfish disregard is very much narcissistic, especially when it is an imposed and mandatory requirement that one is unable to affect. Me calling it out is what makes narcissists so activated and animated about it; and trying to deploy their typical deflection, inversion, distraction tactics.
How about this, if a bureaucrat's vacation plans are not covered by someone else that can perform their kafkaesque duties, then it means automatic action in favor of the citizen trying to follow the sadistic rules.
But that will also not be satisfactory to narcissists because it means they lose control and power over others. What do you think that feeling is that you are feeling on reading my proposal? There should be no risk in it since the system should/would simply make sure that there is always adequate competent coverage and some bureaucratic slave manager can whip the subordinate serf into compliance with whatever sadistic rules and processes that were put in place. But that too will cause narcissists to twitch because that means they will be accountable and have to be competent.
How is people having reasonable work place environments related to shit customer support and companies trying to optimize for reducing costs? Seems highly unrelated.
Really? I get a 403 that I must enable Lab models on https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy. When I try to do that, it gives "There was an error trying to update the Labs setting."
Do you have that Labs setting enabled? When I contacted support, they said "enabling Labs models isn't available for self-serve activation on standard individual accounts." Do you have a different type of account?
I did get a refund quite quickly, after I finally figured out how to contact their support, which in some stroke of cosmic humor took deepseek to figure out because using their website left my trapped in a dead-end loop. Asking mistral for help lead to links that all 404'd or the same useless help section / faq page.
Yea, because the tech gigants are known to have a good support. You won’t be talking to a real human in Google, Facebook, OpenAi if you are just a normal consumer/tiny business.
Oh really? Then why did I have to submit a google form to anthropic asking them to unblock me for something they never even explained? They ignored my request, then a week later sent me a message saying I had been unblocked, yet I still couldn’t log in. And there was still no way to speak to anybody with a spine or a brain? Is that the treatment your american kings get?
What a coincidence! I just released OpenATP earlier today. OpenATP is an open-source Python package and CLI for agentic automated theorem provers. It includes support for Leanstral with Mistral’s Vibe harness. The previous production Leanstral model was deprecated on May 22nd. I will update the package to point to Leanstral 1.5 ASAP!
Tangential, but I'm pretty sad about EU having absolutely nothing in the actual SotA LLM market. Especially given the recent events of US completely restricting the actual SotA models.
Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do.
Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
Software in general, AI as well, is a rich get richer market. The big American companies can afford to (and very much do) scoop up European talents and upcoming European companies. And if they don't want to buy them, they can undercut them to bankruptcy. We live in a colony economy, with human capital as the raw produce, and it all gets funneled to the USA.
The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.
Europeans should thank Trump for that. Digital sovereignty became a major theme mostly because his hollow head could not comprehend the previous strategy.
I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this.
That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money.
If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back.
I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.
> Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
For the most part, yes.
France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago.
Mistral has raised $4B+ which is a decent chunk of change, albeit not in the league of OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI.
The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons).
Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either.
But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training.
There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes!
And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages.
So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.
The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.
I agree with your analysis, at least as long as we shall remain strictly inside the free market methodologies. And having a common capital market would be good no matter what.
But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.
One could make the case that being SotA in 2026 is very costly and not that important for being SotA in 2030 if much more efficient models indeed happens.
They already stole all the data on the internet to train their models. These models haven't improved significantly in some time and remember that they lose money on every query. Why should anyone outside does companies get involved now, right before the whole show is about to collapse?
Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
[citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads).
Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
---
Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.
The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector.
Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...
So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
Given that American and Chinese models exist in an environment where the executive can and will pull models because the vibes are off, or they don't think a company is sufficiently deferential or politically aligned, this feels like false attribution.
I'm not sure I understand the Weights policy. This site says the weights are Apache-licensed, suggesting it's open weights. But I can't find a download link. Their Huggingface profile seems to only provide an earlier snapshot [0]. Any pointers on whether/where we can or will be able to download the weights?
Leanstral 1.5 - June 30, 2026
An updated Lean 4 formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization. 119B total parameters, 6.5B active.
I would have preferred actual proof objects, as in Metamath's: separate the actual proof from the heuristics used to find it (also valuable, but a different thing).
Real talk, does anyone use anything from Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing? Or is it only used "because EU"? Just focus on answering the question. I wonder if anyone has observed it perform better on any objective metric in any rigorous setting.
I use their Voxtral Mini STT audio model to automatically transcribe my podcasts into markdown.
Out of all the STT models I've tried, it's both the best performing and one of the cheapest!
It's really accurate, feeding the episode notes and the podcast description ensures all names are properly spelled, and speaker diarization works really great.
(I just do a Gemini flash pass at the end to identify the speakers, so it shows the host name instead of "Speaker 1")
For writing and languange learning it's very decent, especially Mistral Large. The pricing is very good too. I really like the consistently low time to first token and good token per second. Claude, especially in the past, would be very inconsistent, often with outages. Mistral mostly just always works and is very fast.
Technical questions are unfortunately hit or miss. I'm lately pretty much always using a system prompt that emphasizes short answers [1], and Opus regularly one-shots it while Mistral needs a follow up. I use big-AGI as a model router [2] (dumb name, great software), which makes switching midway very easy though. For coding I'm still using Claude Code mostly out of inertia (although I really want to move to an OSS harness) and the one time I tried their `vibe` tool months ago it was a bit rough.
Mistral TTS with diarization is also great and cheap. That's the only thing for which I use their web UI.
[1] Give a short but helpful answer to the question the user asks. When helping with a computer-related task, unless the user asks, don't give any installation or setup instructions, but just get straight to the point. When the user asks a follow up question, give a more complete and longer answer while still not overexplaining. When the user prefaces the question with "short mode off" in any question, give a full and well considered reply.
We are not Mistral's target audience. For instance I don't know if Leanstral performs the best as a "formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization" because I don't even know wth that is or who else does it.
Mistral themselves focus more on b2b; financial services, manufacturing, stuff like that, and they get some big clients that way.
Despite not being their target, I started using them because they have many open models. I continue using them because, yeah EU, but also because the community is great and the tool makes me think more than Claude does. Last, I stick with them because they are one of the few AI companies that are up-front about their environmental impact and are actually trying to minimize it while still providing a decent product.
If you can express a solution in Lean you can formally prove or disprove it. Formal verification is making a debut in traditional engineering toolkits.
OCR is off the charts good on every metric you can think of.
LLMs are a near-afterthought at this point if you don’t have data residency requirements. I love them and they’re slightly underrated, their models are consistently well-trained, open, but as you note, behind. There is no metric that will say they’re ahead in anything.
Hmm, not sure I'd agree. I really like google's offering there (they suck at coding agents but their OCR is good value for money - well up till the latest flash model which has got wicked expensive). See also https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard
I know these leaderboards are iffy, but at least my experience has been somewhat similar.
Thank you for sharing this, I’ve had some disquiet around the release blogs…something felt cherry-picked and I didn’t know there was a 3rd party source for evals, that settles it easily - like you said they can be iffy but there’s a clear enough gap and large set of models for me to let go of the idea it’s the best by some margin.
A few months ago, I had some data cleaning to do; their small model was surprisingly efficient and got the job done for 0.2x what I expected to run (Anthropic Sonnet / Haiku). Their TTS / STT is also roughly at the frontier, at least for French.
But I admit I only consider them because they're from France. Haven't seen a dimension where they're competitive for general users
I use it as my workhorse for coding and general chat questions, because it's good enough 80% of the time, and indeed it's french/european (with heavy US capital tho...).
We complain too much about not having enough major competitors in the IT space, to not support a burgeoning one even if it's less powerful than SOTA labs
> Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing?
I am. I use them primarily through their vibe CLI.
Reason is simple: They are cheaper (by almost one order of magnitude compared to Claude) and still do the job pretty well.
For small programming tasks, quick prototyping, refactoring or anything verbose and not requiring a context too large: I first go to Mistral and then eventually to Claude if I'm unsatisfied.
I also found out some of their models to be more responsive than OpenAI ones (which is not so surprising considering the size).
My tasks are mainly C++ and Python programming. People in other languages might not share my enthusiasm.
For a defense project we're working on, we basically have a hard requirement to use european cloud provider + european llm
We cannot use open source LLMs on-prem, I asked. So that's basically a hard requirement to use mistral, even though Chinese models are strictly better on every dimension.
I made a game (https://prose-or-con.com) where you pick whether writing is AI or human. Mistral is a bonkers weird writer. So weird I fell for it a couple of times because I thought, "No way a model writes this weird." Not, like, incorrect grammar or spelling or anything, just...off-kilter. Kinda sassy.
Yes, it's on the todo list, but I need more data. Only a half dozen people have played it and submitted a score. I'm storing the hashes of passages people got right and wrong so I can make exactly that chart at some point. I think both "the most human-like AI" and "the most AI-like human" are both interesting pieces of data, but I don't know either yet.
I use it because EU and API pricing is decent to me. And support is awesome also. They reply the same day or at most the next day, and they follow the ticket great. It isn't that bad, but neither the best.
I used them because they had the fastest chat response. (Dont think that’s the case anymore, and they introduced some UI blocking feature on load which is irritating, but still use it mainly due to habit)
I still prefer Mistral Nemo 12B for text summarisation tasks. It has a nice style. The Mistral Small 24B is also decent. I have a YouTube transcript summariser which I like these for.
However these days I usually have Qwen 3.6 27B already loaded so I mostly just use that instead.
just used mistral for a database/scraping creation tool and ended at <10k€ in token costs (via openrouter), beating gpt5.4-mini in output quality and speed and costs after actual testing A/B fairly. so its a super scoped task to be performed hundreds of thousands of time for some automation and mistral just did it better across all dimensions that gpt-5.4-mini. of course thats not a headline in terms of frontier model competitiveness, but for "the boring parts" it just was flat out better than anything else consistently. bonus points it handles mixed-language-content with nuances surprisingly well to turn web content in the wild into structured data really good and fast.
Lean is intended by its authors to be also used as a general-purpose programming language. Lean stdlib contains an HTTP server for example.
IMO the biggest problems are the lack of documentation, instability and poor ecosystem. There are user libraries for some programming tasks (e.g. HTTP router, graphics API bindings) but they are mostly proofs of concept and not actively developed or maintained.
This went to market horribly (if you can even call it that), just look at the comments. Mistral played themselves big time over the past ~18 months. Non-competitive products and models combined with bad marketing and GTM...Oh Europe
Got curious, sign up, add money to account, try to use. Can't, it's a labs model. Fine, let's enable labs. Can't, unspecified error. Fine, lets contact customer support as instructed, can't no customer support, just a half-assed FAQ, that seems vibe-coded and searched poorly, totally irrelevant answers coming up for all queries tried. Then it hit me:
If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
> If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?
They do! E.g. Cursor. See earlier discussions like "Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations"[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012
thanks! I hate it!
No one ever thought it made good customer support. It makes cheap customer support, and quite a lot of companies already have shitty customer support because they don't care about it being good, so they're thrilled to get to cut costs further.
It's "good" from the perspective of a company that's annoyed to have to spend money on actually fixing things.
I laughed and cried at this comment. It's so uncannily EU. Just spent 18 months landing an EU enterprise contract. Signed today and sent it back and got an automated message 'sorry will be on vacation til end of July...' This is the fourth vacation emails I got since corresponding with this contact window for the past 1 year.
Yes, we have more vacation in the EU than people in the US.
It's absolutely possible for individual employees to have generous vacations, while at the same time maintaining a continuously staffed support function.
Eh, Europe has some great service cultures. (There was a recent comment citing an article contrasting its furniture and tech industries I’m having trouble finding.)
European tech’s service culture is just distinctly and notoriously terrible, even within Europe.
it's more like nothing even happens in summer.
A lot happens, just not at work.
[flagged]
> It’s a common disgusting mentality wide spread across Europe.
Yeah it's such a disgusting mentality to appreciate a work life balance and not have work be your entire world. Such a horrible existence.
Anyway, I'm off on holidays now, enjoy!
The fact that you ignore the core of what I said and deflected with distraction is quite telling.
I agree with you, but the point was not anything about work life balance; it was about not being selfish, self centered, narcissistic; realizing that others may not have the ability or are not going on vacation at that given time and there should always be someone, especially in a kafkaesque type bureaucracy as Germany, who can assist in accomplishing whatever horrific bureaucratic control mechanism must be suffered to accomplish basic things.
My point was about continuity, not you talking about your vacation to rationalize the abuse of others who are not going on vacation but whose life you impact by your absence and lack of continuity, someone else not being able to competently perform your role in your absence, making them have to wait for your return from your work life balance vacation. It’s just narcissism, the disgusting mentality I called out and you reacted to.
> the abuse of others who are not going on vacation but whose life you impact by your absence and lack of continuity
That’s the point - this doesn’t matter and work is organized so that people can go home guilt free.
Coworkers should be able to take over; managers are responsible for coordinating vacation time, training and handovers. The customers are free to switch companies.
Talk about narcissism. You don't want anyone to have any guilt even when they adversely and negatively affect others.
How about this, you don't put others in a bind or adversely affect them if you don't want actual guilt, regardless of whether you want to feel it or not. This is the kind of messed up mentality that I was saying is so prevalent across Europe, if not narcissism, very much narcissistic in nature... I don't care about anything or anyone else but me and my vacation/time off.
And no, please don't try to distract with the red herrings. I am not advocating for employees to be abused; there is in fact a middle ground which I am advocating for, where if you want "guilt free feelings" ... DON'T BE GUILTY of abusing others by not caring about your responsibilities towards them.
It does still apply to companies, which, if you have some standing, let alone paid relationship with; have a duty to engage in that relationship. But I am also mostly talking about the bureaucracy, since that is in fact the OP topic, bureaucratic entitled narcissists simply just leaving others in a lurch because they go on a month long vacation, literally causing and costing damages and financial loss to someone.
> I am not advocating for employees to be abused; there is in fact a middle ground (…) DON'T BE GUILTY of abusing others by not caring about your responsibilities towards them.
My point is that the responsibility of the employer towards the employee (to allow time for vacation) has priority over the responsibilities of the employee towards the customer. It’s not the employee that failed you, it’s the employer. The employee cannot stay at work and the employer is responsible for providing replacement.
Still, why not switch companies to non eu ones?
> narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others
This has to be rage bait right? What kind of hellscape do you live in where other humans taking vacation and wanting that to be respected is selfish? And how do you not realize the irony in what you're complaining about? Do you never take a vacation where you actually disconnect from your work?
I am German living in Germany and yes, I think not organizing a holiday replacement when you leave for more than a week is a sign of negligence and indifference; but unfortunately, it becomes more and more common to behave in that way. Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders. I'd like to declare these ~10 weeks "individual contribution weeks" in which no one is allowed to do anything that needs the coordination of more than two persons.
it's because there is no incentive in general in EU to be excellent at your job. good or bad, you get the same pay, and dont get compensated for bringing extra value to the company
so naturally employees have a "fuck you" attitude
Obviously untrue, any place on earth you get rewarded for being better at your job, either directly by being promoted or after asking/getting a higher salary, or indirectly by being able to change jobs by outright being better. This is true in most sectors, especially in software where it's really easy to switch jobs if you have the slightest amount of brain power.
Where are all these misconceptions come from? And how are they so far from reality they don't even pass the slightest of critical thinking?
As a software engineer that has worked in multiple German companies I can tell you that it’s not the case, or at least in Germany. If you do an amazing job, they would praise you and give you a promotion with 2% salary increase and more work. To add salt to the I wound, your colleague that has been on paternity leave for 3 months and on sick leave for 4 months would get the same salary increase
You are in Germany … and not the island you came from. Maybe consider not being such an entitled ingrate, regardless of how messed up the system may be.
You have something that is way beyond what you are deserve or, frankly, is acceptable. You should maybe just enjoy and be grateful for what you do have that others were betrayed so you can have it, not what you believe you should be even more entitled to have that belongs to others you’ve taken it from.
I presume you are free to return to your island if you object?
Are you speedrunning a ban? Or are you ragebaiting?
so where are all the EU global software/tech companies? why is EU so reliant on US software? why do the best EU software developers move to US?
Do you think those things are all because of "there is no incentive in general in EU to be excellent at your job"? How on earth is all these things you're complaining about related? You're seemingly only interested in listing what you think EU does wrong, but none of your arguments are connected, why don't you write one proper comment instead of this trash you're sharing currently?
Because the US has vastly larger capital markets, and they suck in money globally such that there's more funding for new, high risk reward software.
why dont they invest in the amazing EU software companies then?
Google bought DeepMind, so its possible
but not much interest
I’m not sure if you meant it, but it is indeed the EU, or what it represents and its purpose to suffocate excellence that is at the very core of this matter.
But the pay does not actually matter either, people can and do excel in spite of pay and even time in many places in Europe and the world. What you are probably inadvertently lamenting is the very purpose of the EU, the underlying mechanism that exists in other packaging like “communism”, but whose underlying mechanisms, the machine underneath the cladding is really just management and suppression of the parasitized masses.
They don’t want you to excel, because you excelling scares the ruling class cabal because you may exceed them. That is at least until they can get their own kind into place and control everything like in the US, then they’ll support this fake narrative of excellence that is prevalent in the US, but is really an illusion, a fraud really, like most other things in the U.S. where nothing is what it is said or implied to be.
Aaah the perfect German neighbors.
Always right, always on top of things.
What can you do? I guess we're in vacance? Oupsy. *shrug in french*
Bisous !
Wait I'm Belgian and it is basically unheard of that a company cannot answer a customer's message for a month.
If it is a small company, then the owner will answer. If it is bigger, holidays will be planned so that no interruption will occur.
Companies can close completely for a week, usually between Christmas and New Year. That's all.
And its the same in my experience in France. Companies want to survive.
But I stand by my ( bad ) joke on our ( beloved ) German neighbors!
I was referring to (mostly) internal projects in "German Mittelstand". Some of them with external partners. Customers might have the same problem, though, if they rely on the expertise of a single specialist. Regular customer support is usually available 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, but that's not what I was referring to. They usually don't manage projects.
What are you talking about? I was referring to German companies where we don't have proper holiday replacements for internal projects, as well as for those with external partners.
> Many projects don't make any progress between mid of June and late August, depending on the number and diversity of stakeholders
That's what, less than 8 weeks, in a year of 52 weeks, where things progress slower, and this is supposedly a big issue? And even if you know and understand that these other people are humans too, just like you, this is seen as "narcissism" and "selfishness", that they take vacations in the summer?
I'm sorry but this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest? I understand your point of view when we talk about huge corporate entities with thousands of employees, but even SMBs with like 200 employees end up in a situation where people with specific jobs will have to be unavailable for weeks (as again, they're human just like you) and you can't realistically hire people to replace those for just some weeks.
you are correct
but its also the reason for the lack of EU tech capability and over-reliance on US
It might be a minor contributor, but it sure isn't the reason.
If you do do much admire economic success through suffering, can I assume that you have relocated to China? (mainland) Because they sure know a thing or two about that...
if you think the status quo is sustainable, and that Europeans can live a luxurious life fueled by cheap Chinese workers...
> BERLIN, June 26 (Reuters) - Volkswagen is considering shutting four German factories and ramping up job cuts to as many as 100,000, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday, in what could be the biggest ever overhaul in the industry.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
I very much agree, the status quo is not sustainable. But I really don't believe that the solution is trying to one-up China in whatever they are doing, or the USA, for that matter.
You are both missing the target. It's far too complex to fully elaborate on here, but suffice it to say that Europe has broken an iron triangle of choices, which not only limits the number of concurrent choices possible, but also require a minimum of choices to be sustainable.
Besides the whole AI thing, what exact "tech capability" is missing in EU or Europe today? Most things been preferable to get from the US as workers are generally abused there for profits, so been cheaper, but capability still exists in Europe and is ramping up. Do you have any specific examples or you're just on the typical anti-EU HN tirade so many of you seem to fall into as soon as EU is even slightly related?
what is the EU equivalent to AWS/GCP/Azure?
or do you think EU doesnt really need that, it can just rent from the americans
what is the EU frontier AI model?
what is the EU frontier chip fabs?
> what is the EU frontier chip fabs?
Where are the US or Chinese equivalents or betters of ASML of the Netherlands?
ASML had $30 bil revenue in 2025
it's main client, TSMC had 4x, $120 bil revenue in 2024
the Chinese equivalents are 5 years away
sounds like VW from 10 years ago - "Chinese can't make quality cars"
What I wrote: "not organizing a holiday replacement when you leave for more than a week is a sign of negligence and indifference"
What you read: "taking vacations in the summer is 'narcissism' and 'selfishness' (...) these other people are humans too, just like you... this is borderline insane and inhuman, do you never rest?"
I rest my case, thank you. Also, 2.5 months are closer to 11 weeks than 8 weeks, but you don't seem to care about a sincere discussion anyways.
Is not rage bait even if it enrages you to hear the truth. It’s rather funny how the narcissists come streaming out of the woodwork when you call them out. But I understand it, narcissists have no ability to instant their own nature, i.e. they wouldn’t be narcissists. It’s an inescapable conundrum and paradox.
You rather typical deflection and distraction does not change any of what I said and you ignored in typical fashion. Humans taking a vacation is great and I fully support it and wish more Americans could take more vacations, but that’s a different topic you’re distracting with.
The selfish and narcissistic aspect is that of the subject post, lack of continuity, especially in a bureaucracy that affects others’ lives. It’s the simplest and most obvious form of narcissism. The fact that you are either unable to see it and are deflecting from it is rather revealing.
It is abrasive, selfish, and narcissistic to lack all ability to comprehend that other people’s lives should not be made dependent on whether one person is it is not on vacation. Is literally the height of selfishness … “I don’t care about anyone else or my impact on them”
Is this a joke you're attempting? You're raging out about someone else being so narcissistic for not letting you continue on with your whole entire life because they took a vacation?
> narcissism and selfishness that is utterly indifferent to the needs of others
Oh the irony
What is ironic about that? There is nothing ironic about that. That's just you inverting and making stuff up out of narcissistic tendencies to deflect from the uncomfortable truth.
One person affecting the life of another out of selfish disregard is very much narcissistic, especially when it is an imposed and mandatory requirement that one is unable to affect. Me calling it out is what makes narcissists so activated and animated about it; and trying to deploy their typical deflection, inversion, distraction tactics.
How about this, if a bureaucrat's vacation plans are not covered by someone else that can perform their kafkaesque duties, then it means automatic action in favor of the citizen trying to follow the sadistic rules.
But that will also not be satisfactory to narcissists because it means they lose control and power over others. What do you think that feeling is that you are feeling on reading my proposal? There should be no risk in it since the system should/would simply make sure that there is always adequate competent coverage and some bureaucratic slave manager can whip the subordinate serf into compliance with whatever sadistic rules and processes that were put in place. But that too will cause narcissists to twitch because that means they will be accountable and have to be competent.
You wanna talk disgusting? Let’s talk about your president.
How is people having reasonable work place environments related to shit customer support and companies trying to optimize for reducing costs? Seems highly unrelated.
launches suck in the US too. See: every single AAA game launch ever
That's frustrating and odd because I can use the model for free (have never connected any form of payment)
Really? I get a 403 that I must enable Lab models on https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy. When I try to do that, it gives "There was an error trying to update the Labs setting."
Do you have that Labs setting enabled? When I contacted support, they said "enabling Labs models isn't available for self-serve activation on standard individual accounts." Do you have a different type of account?
These guys don't answer emails. Same for qwant.
Sample of two, but I'm assuming french companies don't like to being contacted n English.
If only they had access to a world class translation system, they could auto translate between languages effortlessly :)
They're just offended by people not using their product :D
Wasn't there a thread recently, about them disappointingly being also just a US company, just with an office in France?
Further down someone said the support is great and they respond within the day.
I did get a refund quite quickly, after I finally figured out how to contact their support, which in some stroke of cosmic humor took deepseek to figure out because using their website left my trapped in a dead-end loop. Asking mistral for help lead to links that all 404'd or the same useless help section / faq page.
they are working on LeChaton fat
You got the authentic European customer support. In America the customer is king and in Europe the customer is shit
Yea, because the tech gigants are known to have a good support. You won’t be talking to a real human in Google, Facebook, OpenAi if you are just a normal consumer/tiny business.
Oh really? Then why did I have to submit a google form to anthropic asking them to unblock me for something they never even explained? They ignored my request, then a week later sent me a message saying I had been unblocked, yet I still couldn’t log in. And there was still no way to speak to anybody with a spine or a brain? Is that the treatment your american kings get?
Atleast the UI looks nice. But I'm having trouble navigating it.
This isn’t the first time. I’m amazed at how they manage to fumble releases over and over …
Because that AI will either expose their business or it will be so nerfed it’s useless.
“Don’t get high on your own supply” - I think it’s Microsoft’s motto.
Fixed, sorry for that!
Mostly political, economic, and social ramifications.
[flagged]
What a coincidence! I just released OpenATP earlier today. OpenATP is an open-source Python package and CLI for agentic automated theorem provers. It includes support for Leanstral with Mistral’s Vibe harness. The previous production Leanstral model was deprecated on May 22nd. I will update the package to point to Leanstral 1.5 ASAP!
GitHub: https://github.com/henryrobbins/open-atp
Docs: https://open-atp.henryrobbins.com
Tangential, but I'm pretty sad about EU having absolutely nothing in the actual SotA LLM market. Especially given the recent events of US completely restricting the actual SotA models.
Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
Mistral is generally winning the fights it chooses to fight and that's what they need to do.
Instead of looking at what EU's economy could contribute towards a SotA model it's more accurate to look at what France's economy could contribute, then compare that to the US or China. The scale isn't there. Instead what I like to see is what they can accomplish with that lower scale, and it's stuff like Leanstral, Voxtral and other niche products.
Software in general, AI as well, is a rich get richer market. The big American companies can afford to (and very much do) scoop up European talents and upcoming European companies. And if they don't want to buy them, they can undercut them to bankruptcy. We live in a colony economy, with human capital as the raw produce, and it all gets funneled to the USA.
The only way to avoid this is to stop playing the game as it is today, and start using proper industrial policy to build up a competitive industry (like China did). There has been no appetite for that the last decades, but Trump is making it completely clear that the state is back, and Europe is slowly acknowledging it as well.
Europeans should thank Trump for that. Digital sovereignty became a major theme mostly because his hollow head could not comprehend the previous strategy.
I would say it is mostly a money problem rooted in the culture. VC funding is not nearly as common in Europe. Not that many people are willing to risk serious money the way US corporations do, or even ordinary Americans through the stock market. Banks will never lend you money for this.
That itself makes it really easy to poach great engineers. You can earn very good money in Europe, but usually not the best money.
If the EU wanted to pour billions into AI labs, national governments would immediately start fighting over which country should host them. These petty disputes, coming from hundreds of years of Europeans killing each other, are one of the main things holding them back.
I believe that in the end, the strategy will be to watch what worked and what did not work for the Americans, then simply copy it. But Europe was never really cut off from crucial technology before, so I'm curious if that will have any interesting solution.
> Has this been just pure lack of funding and infra?
For the most part, yes.
France and Germany are the two biggest EU economies. France has well, Mistral, and we here have a government-funded VC entity that is way too proud [1] to be able to offer a whopping… €125 million (<$150 M USD) for helping European researchers achieve new SOTA in sovereign models. And that sum is not even going to a single challenge winner, it'll be split up among multiple recipients. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool first step, or rather, would have been one about three to four years ago.
It's a pity, really.
[1] (in German) https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/verkuendung-next-fronti...
Mistral has raised $4B+ which is a decent chunk of change, albeit not in the league of OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI.
The hard part is justifying pure LLM development financially. Models are all very similar. OpenAI justified it originally by being a 'charity' dedicated to pure research (not financial). Anthropic justified it by saying OpenAI didn't care enough about safety and splitting from them (not financial). Elon justified it by saying that AI would be woke and untruthful unless he built Grok (not financial). Google did Gemini because, well, they're where it all started and because AI research was one of the core missions Larry & Sergey gave it when they started it (but then sat on it for financial reasons).
Then there's the Chinese models. It's unclear what their motives are tbh. I've never seen a really great explanation, only hypotheses. But as they're giving them away for free or very underpriced, their motivation doesn't seem to be financial either.
But Mistral is a normal company. It doesn't have rich backers giving it money based on narratives about cosmic destiny, so it needs to justify what it's doing with ROI. So that more or less rules out large scale LLM training.
There's also EU regulation to consider. When I looked at this in the past I found lots of odd rules that kill off any chance of having a European tech industry. The UK had one that said you could only crawl the internet for research purposes!
https://knowledgerights21.org/news-story/the-uks-copyright-l...
And without the First Amendment you're at much greater risk of being prosecuted for things your models say. See how Germany has taken Google to court over things its models put in its search result pages.
So the benefit isn't clear and the legal risks are very high.
Someone commented on this page that their main market are long term b2b contracts. If that’s true then what you are saying isn’t a problem.
Right, they pivoted, but originally they were a pure play LLM developer.
The EU simply doesn't have a proper common market, especially when it comes to capital. Having more people than the US and a big economy in aggregate doesn't matter much if you can't efficiently pool resources. Could we in Europe have 100 billion fundraises for a new lab? If not, then it's over and you can give up.
I agree with your analysis, at least as long as we shall remain strictly inside the free market methodologies. And having a common capital market would be good no matter what.
But there are other ways to pool resources than the free market. Airbus was not made dynamically in a market, neither was the LHC. 100 billion € is a lot, it's half of the total allocated aid from Europe to Ukraina. Which can be read in two ways, either 'helping Ukraine is already weighing us down, another similar cost is too much for some IT toy ', or 'Europe has the ability to collect massive amount of capital when it needs to, and AI is a existential threat which justifies it'.
One could make the case that being SotA in 2026 is very costly and not that important for being SotA in 2030 if much more efficient models indeed happens.
How much does supporting multiple languages as first-class citizens (versus adding a translation layer) cost a model?
absolutely nothing id imagine? you think all the chinese are using their models in english?
Culture
[dead]
[flagged]
They already stole all the data on the internet to train their models. These models haven't improved significantly in some time and remember that they lose money on every query. Why should anyone outside does companies get involved now, right before the whole show is about to collapse?
That act applies just as much to those American and Chinese models within the EU.
Which is a mistake the EU makes again and again. If you put onerous requirements on everyone, this means that the most well-capitalized firms will be able to shoulder the regulatory overhead the easiest. But who can't? New European startups. This already killed part of the tech sector with the GDPR while Google and Meta just hire 100 lawyers and are done with it.
[citation needed] here. The tech sector is still well and alive in EU, and outside adtech (which was hit hard by GDPR - that was the point) doesn't seem to have been visibly impacted.
AI research was mostly funded during the 2010s by Google (funded by ads) and FAIR (Facebook AI Research, funded by ads).
Killing off adtech didn't reduce the number of ads seen by people in Europe or make any observable difference to anyone's lives, but did help ensure a company capable of developing LLMs could not arise,
You say this as if ad revenue is the only possible way we could have done AI research - which is an _extremely_ weird take given the history of academia and R&D. Today adtech companies just make up the richest companies in the world, so it's not very surprising that they're the ones behind LLMs - they have more money to throw at the problem than most. I'm pretty confident that - if adtech companies didn't exist, we'd find other means of funding AI research (private investment, public funding, R&D spend from non-adtech companies, etc...).
When the internet was researched and developed, it wasn't funded by adtech, and yet it managed to develop it just fine.
---
Also, the point of GDPR wasn't to reduce the number of ads. It was to prevent massive, indiscriminate information gathering. Now, whether that was successful or not is debatable - I have my own gripes on GDPR enforcement (I really hope the banners will get nuked out of existence).
I think the weird take is to assume it could have been otherwise when almost all the work was ad funded. It's not a coincidence it was Google and Facebook doing the research, IMO. Universities did a bit but like usual with academia the moment it benefited from large scale engineering to make progress they lost out to commercial labs.
"The tech sector is still well and alive in EU" [citation needed]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_N3-FKbi5c
https://www.cer.eu/insights/europe-has-produced-tech-champio...
https://www.investeurope.eu/news/newsroom/state-of-european-...
The tech sector represents 15% of EU's GDP. I currently work in the tech sector in europe, there's no shortage of companies hiring (both startups and enterprise), and anecdotally, from my personal network, enough startups are surviving the 5 and 10 years mark that I'm pretty confident there's enough new ideas/companies (as opposed to only having old/legacy enterprises) to ensure the good health of the sector.
Now, I will acknowledge that funding is more complicated in the EU compared to the US - but that's something that has been acknowledged by EU leadership and is being actively worked on. The Draghi report lays out a vision for how this can be achieved, with recommendation on what steps to take to achieve that vision. https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...
So yeah, the tech sector is still well and alive in the EU, and there is reason to believe that it's going to get in an even better position.
Citation: Anybody working in tech in Europe can tell you this.
Given that American and Chinese models exist in an environment where the executive can and will pull models because the vibes are off, or they don't think a company is sufficiently deferential or politically aligned, this feels like false attribution.
I'm not sure I understand the Weights policy. This site says the weights are Apache-licensed, suggesting it's open weights. But I can't find a download link. Their Huggingface profile seems to only provide an earlier snapshot [0]. Any pointers on whether/where we can or will be able to download the weights?
[0] https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Leanstral-2603
Huh, I haven't found the weights either.
404?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260630223430/https://docs.mist...
Discussion about Leanstral 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47404796
"Page not found" for me. Did you manage to access this? What is this about?
from the web archive:
Leanstral 1.5 - June 30, 2026 An updated Lean 4 formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization. 119B total parameters, 6.5B active.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260630223430/https://docs.mist...
Lean 4 and Idris 2 are underrated, and likely great for LLM's to code in (since they provide additional guarantees)
I am getting 404 right now
Interesting that this only specialized for Lean4 and not for similar like Coq
I would have preferred actual proof objects, as in Metamath's: separate the actual proof from the heuristics used to find it (also valuable, but a different thing).
Real talk, does anyone use anything from Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing? Or is it only used "because EU"? Just focus on answering the question. I wonder if anyone has observed it perform better on any objective metric in any rigorous setting.
I use their Voxtral Mini STT audio model to automatically transcribe my podcasts into markdown. Out of all the STT models I've tried, it's both the best performing and one of the cheapest! It's really accurate, feeding the episode notes and the podcast description ensures all names are properly spelled, and speaker diarization works really great. (I just do a Gemini flash pass at the end to identify the speakers, so it shows the host name instead of "Speaker 1")
For writing and languange learning it's very decent, especially Mistral Large. The pricing is very good too. I really like the consistently low time to first token and good token per second. Claude, especially in the past, would be very inconsistent, often with outages. Mistral mostly just always works and is very fast.
Technical questions are unfortunately hit or miss. I'm lately pretty much always using a system prompt that emphasizes short answers [1], and Opus regularly one-shots it while Mistral needs a follow up. I use big-AGI as a model router [2] (dumb name, great software), which makes switching midway very easy though. For coding I'm still using Claude Code mostly out of inertia (although I really want to move to an OSS harness) and the one time I tried their `vibe` tool months ago it was a bit rough.
Mistral TTS with diarization is also great and cheap. That's the only thing for which I use their web UI.
[1] Give a short but helpful answer to the question the user asks. When helping with a computer-related task, unless the user asks, don't give any installation or setup instructions, but just get straight to the point. When the user asks a follow up question, give a more complete and longer answer while still not overexplaining. When the user prefaces the question with "short mode off" in any question, give a full and well considered reply.
[2] https://github.com/enricoros/big-AGI
vibe has improved _a lot_ during the past few months, fyi.
The new Mistral Medium 3.5 is also a big improvement over devstral-2
Mistral doesn't have caching on batches. For me that meant they are 10x more expensive than Google.
I think its dumb.
Their support is hidden away in a chat bubble at the bottom. But they do respond promptly.
Its decent, but after switching to Google i wouldn't go back
We are not Mistral's target audience. For instance I don't know if Leanstral performs the best as a "formal proof engineering model optimised for automated theorem proving and autoformalization" because I don't even know wth that is or who else does it.
Mistral themselves focus more on b2b; financial services, manufacturing, stuff like that, and they get some big clients that way.
Despite not being their target, I started using them because they have many open models. I continue using them because, yeah EU, but also because the community is great and the tool makes me think more than Claude does. Last, I stick with them because they are one of the few AI companies that are up-front about their environmental impact and are actually trying to minimize it while still providing a decent product.
It's for mathematics. There is this programming language: https://lean-lang.org/
If you can express a solution in Lean you can formally prove or disprove it. Formal verification is making a debut in traditional engineering toolkits.
OCR is off the charts good on every metric you can think of.
LLMs are a near-afterthought at this point if you don’t have data residency requirements. I love them and they’re slightly underrated, their models are consistently well-trained, open, but as you note, behind. There is no metric that will say they’re ahead in anything.
This. Best OCR provider by measure and it’s been for years
Hmm, not sure I'd agree. I really like google's offering there (they suck at coding agents but their OCR is good value for money - well up till the latest flash model which has got wicked expensive). See also https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard I know these leaderboards are iffy, but at least my experience has been somewhat similar.
Thank you for sharing this, I’ve had some disquiet around the release blogs…something felt cherry-picked and I didn’t know there was a 3rd party source for evals, that settles it easily - like you said they can be iffy but there’s a clear enough gap and large set of models for me to let go of the idea it’s the best by some margin.
Mistral medium is considerably better at writing than Opus.
I’ve also found it very good at pulling info from pdfs. Even a complicated festival with multiple venues and timetables.
Writing what? I found it worse than gemma4 at coding even though it's 4x the parameter size
A few months ago, I had some data cleaning to do; their small model was surprisingly efficient and got the job done for 0.2x what I expected to run (Anthropic Sonnet / Haiku). Their TTS / STT is also roughly at the frontier, at least for French.
But I admit I only consider them because they're from France. Haven't seen a dimension where they're competitive for general users
I use it as my workhorse for coding and general chat questions, because it's good enough 80% of the time, and indeed it's french/european (with heavy US capital tho...).
We complain too much about not having enough major competitors in the IT space, to not support a burgeoning one even if it's less powerful than SOTA labs
Well, if you're a taxpayer in EU you're already supporting it implicitly.
> Mistral because it performs the best, by whatever secular metric of your choosing?
I am. I use them primarily through their vibe CLI.
Reason is simple: They are cheaper (by almost one order of magnitude compared to Claude) and still do the job pretty well.
For small programming tasks, quick prototyping, refactoring or anything verbose and not requiring a context too large: I first go to Mistral and then eventually to Claude if I'm unsatisfied.
I also found out some of their models to be more responsive than OpenAI ones (which is not so surprising considering the size).
My tasks are mainly C++ and Python programming. People in other languages might not share my enthusiasm.
Your reason can't be cost because there are superior models that are cheaper than Mistral models, for coding. So i re-ask the question
> Your reason can't be cost because there are superior models that are cheaper than Mistral models
Nope. This is not my experience.
Public pricing in token/$ is only part of the equation.
Mistral tooling to consume significantly less tokens-per-given-task than the Anthropic ones.
My bills currently reflects that.
I think other commenter is talking about smaller/cheaper models like Qwen that outperform mistral on just about every metric
I played with Qwen few months ago, I do prefer Mistral vibe for everyday usage (significantly faster if not self hosted).
Compare to Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 you will be shocked
>Just focus on answering the question.
Are you trying to instruct me like an LLM?
For a defense project we're working on, we basically have a hard requirement to use european cloud provider + european llm
We cannot use open source LLMs on-prem, I asked. So that's basically a hard requirement to use mistral, even though Chinese models are strictly better on every dimension.
Is there a rationale behind why not on prem? Boogeyman fears about LLMs? No hardware? Or do you mean, no Chinese LLMs?
I like the models for creative writing. They have a distinct voice that is different from the other llms.
I made a game (https://prose-or-con.com) where you pick whether writing is AI or human. Mistral is a bonkers weird writer. So weird I fell for it a couple of times because I thought, "No way a model writes this weird." Not, like, incorrect grammar or spelling or anything, just...off-kilter. Kinda sassy.
needs a leaderboard of models most often mistaken for humans.
Yes, it's on the todo list, but I need more data. Only a half dozen people have played it and submitted a score. I'm storing the hashes of passages people got right and wrong so I can make exactly that chart at some point. I think both "the most human-like AI" and "the most AI-like human" are both interesting pieces of data, but I don't know either yet.
try posting it on r/localllama and r/sillytavernai
I use it because it’s a simple, convenient and cheap OCR api. Specifically via my ringbinder[1] tool.
[1]: https://github.com/maxim/ringbinder
I use it because EU and API pricing is decent to me. And support is awesome also. They reply the same day or at most the next day, and they follow the ticket great. It isn't that bad, but neither the best.
Why do you need support so often?
I used them because they had the fastest chat response. (Dont think that’s the case anymore, and they introduced some UI blocking feature on load which is irritating, but still use it mainly due to habit)
I still prefer Mistral Nemo 12B for text summarisation tasks. It has a nice style. The Mistral Small 24B is also decent. I have a YouTube transcript summariser which I like these for.
However these days I usually have Qwen 3.6 27B already loaded so I mostly just use that instead.
I liked that their website didn’t ask for my phone number, IIRC.
just used mistral for a database/scraping creation tool and ended at <10k€ in token costs (via openrouter), beating gpt5.4-mini in output quality and speed and costs after actual testing A/B fairly. so its a super scoped task to be performed hundreds of thousands of time for some automation and mistral just did it better across all dimensions that gpt-5.4-mini. of course thats not a headline in terms of frontier model competitiveness, but for "the boring parts" it just was flat out better than anything else consistently. bonus points it handles mixed-language-content with nuances surprisingly well to turn web content in the wild into structured data really good and fast.
Registered due this news. But I must connect to GitHub to use "Code"? That seems limited?
Is this useful for specifying programs too or only theorems?
Curry-Howard correspondence.
It may be theoretically possible, but is it ergonomic and useful? Do you use Lean for your programs?
Lean is intended by its authors to be also used as a general-purpose programming language. Lean stdlib contains an HTTP server for example.
IMO the biggest problems are the lack of documentation, instability and poor ecosystem. There are user libraries for some programming tasks (e.g. HTTP router, graphics API bindings) but they are mostly proofs of concept and not actively developed or maintained.
use https://rocq-prover.org/ for that purpose
I used Lean for AoC last time and it’s really good.
[dead]
This went to market horribly (if you can even call it that), just look at the comments. Mistral played themselves big time over the past ~18 months. Non-competitive products and models combined with bad marketing and GTM...Oh Europe