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Comment by ogou | Hacker News Reader

Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.

Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.

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I also think that this is the best approach for businesses wanting to adopt AI to automate, streamline, etc their business.

The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.

If they can pull ahead in having the most number of pre-trained models (one for this ERP, one for that CRM, etc) and then being able to close sales to companies using these products and sell them on post-trained (give us your specific ERP customisations and we'll give you access to a model that is tailored to your business), then THAT is a moat.

But they need to do this without fanfare. Just close sales, and keep closing, basically. After all, even if other AI providers copy the process, the moat would already have been established for Mistral.

> The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.

My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.

> My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.

I hope you are right (I am in the process of finalising a product and one of the top-5 selling points contains "outside the jurisdiction of the US"), but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.

> but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.

Sure, Mistral AI is certainly not the market leader and probably never will be but we're not talking about being a market leader but about having a moat.

I instantly believe you when you tell me that many companies do not care. On the other hand there are companies that do. At least partially: ASML, Stellantis, AXA, BNP Paribas, the French ministry of defense, Helsing, SNCF, ... are all Mistral AI customers.

Mistral is still hosted on US providers, their EU centers are only in planning. Data access aside, if AWS or Azure (or Cloudflare) are ordered to pull the plug, it's still goodbye Mistral. Unless you use a third party hoster that is, or do it yourself of course - already possible.

To extend on that a little bit: they use data centers located in EU, but owned by US cloud providers. They can still pull the plug ofc, so it's only a small difference, but still

This moat doesn't seem to be much of a moat considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage - except DeepSeek, which would be a strange choice for Europeans looking for data sovereignty.

> This moat doesn't seem to be much of a moat considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage - except DeepSeek, which would be a strange choice for Europeans looking for data sovereignty.

Hang on, where are you getting the numbers from? I looked and I couldn't find any numbers on enterprises who opened their wallets for custom-trained models.

I looked, and because I believed that it might be a good business opportunity to explore, I did spend a bit of time trying to find numbers. I came away with the feeling that the winner in the AI space is going to be whoever successfully whitelabels their offering.

Right now that is Mistral, I think.

> considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage

How do you measure "usage" in an enterprise/commercial context where no data on usage is available to you? I don't expect Mistral AI to make it's money on OpenRouter.

They offer self-hosted models for big corporate customers. I would also expect those serious about the security of their data to use that option. So you would never get the usage of those customers

If you are a company based in Europe it is silly to give your data security and privacy to a company based in Europe.

If you are in Iran, you don't want to give your data to your government.

If you are in France, you don't want to give your data to your government.

etc

If you are in France, and you host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong, well good luck for the authorities to get it.

If you host it in "secure France", on the paper you will have more privacy and laws behind you, but in reality you are jumping into the mouth of the shark.

This is why governments are promoting: "yes yes, host here don't worry, we will protect you"

This flat out isn't true. Police forces / investigative authorities have been collaborating with one another since 1923: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol . We have tons of examples of this working for the digital world as well (like Proton complying with Swiss legal orders at the behest of non-Swiss police forces for illegal activities in other countries).

The trick is to host your data in a country with a strong rule of law, and avoid illegal / geopolitical lines. If you're an American company hosting stuff in Russia, you can bet the GRU/SVR would be very happy to abuse it. If you're running a torrent site in Ukraine, you can bet the US would be very happy to claim extraterritorial magic jurisdiction and get you extradited from Poland.

As a French company, you're already beholden to French law and French legal decisions. "Data is hosted in Hong Kong" doesn't matter in the slightest, it only exposes you to more risk.

It's not about government but about trade secrets...

> well good luck for the authorities to get it.

"We want your data on X, here;'s a warrant."

"No."

"You are now under arrest for contempt of court."

People have some oddly silly views on what government can and can't do to people living in their territories.

And companies really really don't care if the government has their data.

> host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong

Now China has it, gives it a competitor in China and your market share drops like a stone. Congrats! Great choice!

Meh, I feel like we are in the "cloud is bad phase" all over again.

Companies will use US ai models without issues in a few years.

Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.

> Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.

I have not seen that, actually. I still see most companies who want to jump into AI for the business sort of try RAG, but more often they just buy Chat accounts for their users.

The only place that harnesses appear to be used is in software development, but most companies aren't doing that either.

> Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off.

Isn't the entire deal with LLMs that they are trained as megaliths? How can bespoke modelling overcome the treasure trove of knowledge that megaliths can generically bring in, even in bespoke scenarios?

ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond. Within those, agents can have sub agents (like when it does research).

When generating images most services will have a small agent that rewrites your request and hands it off to the generative image model.

So from the treasure trove point of view, optimized agents have their place. From companies building pipelines, they also have their place.

> ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond.

Right, but this was done to value-optimize the product, i.e. try to always give you the shittiest (cheapest) model you can bear, because otherwise people would always choose the smartest (most expensive) model for any query.

Taking away the model choice from the user introduces a lot of ways to cut down costs, but one thing it does not do is make the product give users better/more reliable answers.

> Isn't the entire deal with LLMs that they are trained as megaliths? How can bespoke modelling overcome the treasure trove of knowledge that megaliths can generically bring in, even in bespoke scenarios?

Think of it as a base model (the megalith) which then has the weights adjusted towards a specific use-case (SAP, for example).

Agreed. I’ve used their platform to train smaller, specialized models. Something I could have done in Codelab or some other tool, but their platform allows me to just upload a training set and as soon as it finishes I have a hosted model available at an endpoint. It obviously has some constraints compared to running the training yourself, but it also opens up the opportunity to way more people.

Indeed, but even for coding use cases, Vibe is more of a focused “refactor/ write this function” aid than “write me an app” and it can work locally. For me that’s a lot more valuable as an accelerator to my workflow where the developer stays in control and fully involved in the process.

The companies I work want onprem models, and no Chinese ones. Does mistral support onprem? ( For a price)

> Not everyone is obsessed with code generation.

They (still) are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47404796

I use a pretty lightweight local Mistral model in LM studio for both creative and technical writing/iterating and it’s fantastic.

I agree. Just started using it. Can you give some examples of fields you maybe even prefer Mistral?

Yes, since it's not American, it will be the de-facto choice for most big European companies.

Why would that be? Most big EU companies use ms teams or google workspace, for example.

They use those because the decision to use them was made years ago. Things have changed since then

I want to believe... but I also need proofs of that "trend", any reference I could read on please?

It's definitely a topic of conversation in Reddit, etc... However I agree that the push to reduce US dependence by EU companies (and countries) is hampered by the fact that US stuff is already embedded (Microsoft but also Google, etc...) and that many of these companies are transnational anyway (very few European companies are solely inside the EU) and finally and most importantly just about every company will choose the option that does the job best for the right price (sovereignty is a distant second for most decision makers).

While few companies announce this publicly, I know from personal experience with corporate clients that many companies are preparing for Trump to use Big Tech as a bargaining chip.

And they should. Because the US is not behaving rationally at all.

https://nltimes.nl/2026/02/10/rabobank-ing-abn-amro-seek-eur...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/13/gartner_cio_cloud_sov...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/europe-zoom-...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...

https://sherwood.news/tech/europe-wants-to-break-up-with-us-...

>While few companies announce this publicly, I know from personal experience with corporate clients

Well I have even more personal experience that contradicts yours, and this isn't true at all. Everyone uses Claude / Gemini / OpenAI. Mistral isn't even on the table.

Just a sample: https://mistral.ai/customers

And you can Google for "We use Mistral" to find thousands of usecases by startups and other companies.

Come on, compared to Google Workspace / Microsoft's whatever-it's-called-these-days, the cost of switching from one LLM provider to another is pretty much zero.

Having an option at the back of your mind is all it takes right now, until push comes to shove of course.

Multiple Government organisations ditching Microsoft? Including entire German states?

My University also migrated to OpenExchange

That's the public sector. I can also give examples of schools in Denmark, cities in France, education system in France, cities in Spain too, but they said "big EU companies".

I don't think big business is genuinely planning for a world where US tech becomes completely unavailable.

Not entirely, but putting more eggs in that basket would certainly be considered lack of planning. Why increase your risk even further when everyone has seen how volatile things can get quickly?

2 years ago I would have agreed with you, but after Greenland the vibe is very different. And it's not like the situation is improving.

No they haven't.

Proof: Most big EU companies use Claude or Gemini or OpenAI, not Mistral. That choice was made recently.

Things have changed in the loud echo chambers of the internet, maybe (but not really, since people were saying that EU data sovereignty was happening any time now since 2016).

> Proof: Most big EU companies use Claude or Gemini or OpenAI, not Mistral. That choice was made recently.

IS a statement with no supporting facts considered "proof"? Just the public list of Mistral customers (https://mistral.ai/customers) is proof alone that quite a few big EU companies are _not_ in fact using Open AI or Claude or Gemini at the strategic level.

Contrast with Antrhopic's Europe based customers, the majority of which are small companies (only big one I can identify from a skim is L'Oreal): https://claude.com/customers?f80ce999_sort_date=desc&f80ce99...

Or OpenAI's customers, of which the only big European ones I can spot are Scania and Philips: https://openai.com/stories/

Note: I'm talking about strategic enterprise AI deployments for the company or at least a division, not individual developers being allowed to use Claude Code etc. The moat and the money will be in the former, not latter.

I consult for various companies and have definitely seen a trend. It's not quite the rupture that some expect but clearly not nothing either. Until very recently, the risk assessment of using US providers was considered very hypothetical. Today it still doesn't feel imminent, but it does feel very real.

Of course, it will be slow and painful and Europeans will need to use their own services for them to grow and mature.

My _feeling_ is that a lot of EU/European politicians has talked a lot more about the need to be independent from the US after Trump threaten Greenland. At least in the nordic countries. Not only concerning data & privacy, but defence, communications, space etc. All areas. The wheel has started to turn. You will not see it if you look around. But in 10 years time, maybe more, Europe will have stopped depending on the US. And that will hit US hard. We pay a lot of money in services to the US.

The politicians can talk, but they needed to set up an environment that would've let a European company have a decent shot at competing with the best AI models. But they didn't. Should've thought of that before being proud of setting up those strict tech regulations.

That is not how EU does things. If you want no regulation and access to capital you should go to the US.

AI will take over a lot and the biggest AI company will be in US and China. But there will be room for Europe also on the top 10 list.

But there will be an environment that is creating sovereignty from US much more the before. We have learned our lesson

Will there be room for Europe though? Doesn't look like it based on other tech markets.

Not at all. We continue taking that decision today.

No they haven't. Every company just buys ChatGPT Enterprise.

Is this the best Grok alternative?

Any model is.

This sounds like an ideology based reply. Grok is underrated and I think has a better chance of long term success than most. The current growth strategy means (for me) their chat harness is not up to par for serious work.

Their API is consistently among the most used on OpenRouter. While I can’t vouch for it myself, I think this is a decent proxy for capability. You can definitely see glimmers of greatness in their chat interface, it just feels like the system prompts are focused on something that doesn’t interest me.

Grok is not SOTA, but its so obviously better than Mistral. Mistral is just some European patriotism or something.

Grok is nice for asking morally gray questions. ChatGPT will lie in these cases.

What lies have you seen? ChatGPT is the most censored one, but I’ve only seen rejections, not lies.

My other complaint is that ChatGPT ends every response with a teaser to ask more questions.

Ask game theory questions with real humans where its best to defect.

> Grok is nice for asking morally gray questions. ChatGPT will lie in these cases.

Are you really that oblivious to the painfully cringy manipulation tactics by the man who partied at Epstein's island? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

Suspicion confirmed

Define ideology and its relevance here.

If you couldn't use the words Europe to describe why you'd chose Mistral, you'd have no good reasons to choose Mistral.

Its just not good. Its bottom floor for LLMs.

> Its bottom floor for LLMs.

What? That's just demonstrably false. The market doesn't consist of 5 providers.

You know about LMarena? I just looked it up, Mistral is number 59 on the list.

Free Chinese models are better than it.

That's one of the possible benchmarks, not the only one. Being 59th there, on a list enriched with every variation of Model_Name X.Y (March 2025 Preview) Pro-Thinking, translates to being in the top 10 providers worldwide which is a very interesting mark of failure considering that coincidentally they're also number 1 from their economic area. If you don't know why the last part is important, go read some news.

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