Interesting. Europe is really putting up a fight for once. I'm into it.
The EU is more similar to NAFTA or five eyes, and culturally the loyalty is more similar to the US vs the anglosphere, like how Americans think of Australia, UK and Canada. Well, again, until recently. Things are changing fast.
Comparing to states is much more far fetched. The UK left the union without any serious retaliation, let alone military conflict. What would happen if Texas or California tried to secede seriously?
Mistral has been consistently last place, or at least last place among ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and Gemini/Gemma.
I know this because I had to use a permissive license for a side project and I was tortured by how miserably bad Mistral was, and how much better every other LLM was.
Need the best? ChatGPT
Need local stuff? Llama(maybe Gemma)
Need to do barely legal things that break most company's TOS? Mistral... although deepseek probably beats it in 2025.
For people outside Europe, we don't have patriotism for our LLMs, we just use the best. Mistral has barely any usecase.
You probably want to replace Llama with Qwen in there. And Gemma is not even close.
> Mistral has been consistently last place, or at least last place among ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and Gemini/Gemma.
Mistral held for a long time the position of "workhorse open-weights base model" and nothing precludes them from taking it again with some smart positioning.
They might not currently be leading a category, but as an outside observer I could see them (like Cohere) actively trying to find innovative business models to survive, reach PMF and keep the dream going, and I find that very laudable. I expect them to experiment a lot during this phase, and that probably means not doubling down on any particular niche until they find a strong signal.
Have you tried the latest, gemma3? I've been pretty impressed with it. Altho I do agree that qwen3 quickly overshadowed it, it seems too soon to dismiss it altogether. EG, the 3~4b and smaller versions of gemma seem to freak out way less frequently than similar param size qwen versions, tho I haven't been able to rule out quant and other factors in this just yet.
It's very difficult to fault anyone for not keeping up with the latest SOTA in this space. The fact we have several options that anyone can serviceably run, even on mobile, is just incredible.
Anyway, i agree that Mistral is worth keeping an eye on. They played a huge part in pushing the other players toward open weights and proving smaller models can have a place at the table. While I personally can't get that excited about a closed model, it's definitely nice to see they haven't tapped out.
Qwen 2.5 14B blows Gemma 27B out of the water for my use. Qwen 2.5 3B is also very competitive. The 3 series is even more interesting with the 0.6B model actually useful for basic tasks and not just a curiosity.
Where I find Qwen relatively lackluster is its complete lack of personality.