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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I like Mistral, it hits the exact sweet spot between cost and my data staying in the EU, withouth a significant drop in quality, but man are their model naming conventions confusing af. They mention they have a model called Devstral 2, which is neither Codestral nor Devestral. I want to use it, but the api only lists devstral-2512, devstral-latest, devstral-medium-latest, devstral-medium-2507, devstral-small, devstral-small-2507.

I think, devstral-latest should be it, no? So I write to support and get an answer 12 hours later that says oh, no, devstral 2 is definetely called devstral 2 and then a page of instructions on how to set it up in Intellij... generated with AI. The screens it is refering to don't exist and never did.

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I got really lost on their site, but to help a bit according to their model page

devstral-2512 devstral-latest and devstral-medium-latest are all devstral 2 https://docs.mistral.ai/models/devstral-2-25-12

labs-devstral-small-2512 and devstral-small-latest are devstral small 2

devstral-medium-2507 is devstral 1.0

and devstral-small-2507 is devstral small 1.1

wow, thank you, this is great. I was thinking they should have a page like this, but I couldn't find myself.

I have a general impression they are not interested too much in individual devs and making it suite their workflow. They want to be a B2B company and deliver a custom workflow per company.

Or it can just be a Google like problem where a big company one part doesn't talk to the other.

you might be correct. for example, they have an intellij plugin that allows integration without the AI Assistant, but it is only available for Enterprise customers

But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts? Or they think golf courts are enough for success? Okay they might be right here, but still they make it so confusing for no obvious reason.

To me it's obvious because the size of companies they are targeting (ASML being an obvious one). I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.

> I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.

It's not like b2b sales is more technical merit based, individual contributor led, elsewhere.

It's always the same, depending on the field individual contributors can have some flexibility on picking tools (so a developer in a mid sized company would be able to pick whatever, an accountant probably would be more constrained, meanwhile a developer at a big bank would not have any choice). But for strategic software choices, that impact the whole company, where standardisation makes sense or is even mandatory to get actual value out of it, you need to sell to high level decision makers, not individual contributors. A CTO or a VP of X can decide to buy and mandate the implementation of something as impactful, workflow changing and potentially time and money saving as a company wide AI platform. A dev can't.

> being made not purely on tech reasons.

As if that’s not true in the US (not just government contracts but VC in general as well)…

In my experience devs rarely have anything to say in B2B contracts. At best they can recommend a solution to the decision maker, but in almost all deals i was a part of they didn’t have any influence on the final decision. I wish it were otherwise but alas

In my experience, this is only true at large companies (say, >200 employees). Which means the large companies of the future will all be taking their business elsewhere.

Also EU protectionism itself might be enough.

Where is EU protectionist?

I feel we are way less protectionist than most other Economic Regions. Including the USA, which are very protectionist but always claim otherwise

Well, if every big company gets a giant EU fine for, say, preinstalling a web browser in an OS, except for EU companies, that could make it easier for the EU companies.

Every company would get fined for anticompetitive behaviour, regardless of where are based.

Well yes, but because there are approximately zero EU tech companies that can be affected by these fines and regulations there is very little political pushback against them.

In a certain sense it’s a way for EU to clawback at least a small slice of all that money flowing to the US.

https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2023/personali...

Why should there be pushback against antitrust measures?

It's what keeps markets alive

Well, not necessarily; lots of things keep markets alive, including making it easier for people to start companies. But that aside, it's the selective enforcement of antitrust measures that's my point.

Where is the selective enforcement?

They also enforce antitrust in other sectors than big tech. You just don't read that much about it in the news

> Well, not necessarily; lots of things keep markets alive, including making it easier for people to start companies

If those companies then got smothered or acquired by big oligo/mono polies, that only gets you so far.

> it's the selective enforcement of antitrust measures that's my point

What is selective about it? I linked in the sibling comment a fine for the biggest European digital ad company. And it's trivial to find the EU blocking anticompetitive behaviour or potential for it in every domain. Alstom and Siemens wanted to merge their train division to create a European champion in train manufacturing to better compete with Chinese companies, and they got denied. Because for the EU competition in Europe is more important than EU companies being able to compete globally (because the EU market is in their purview, global ones are not).

Well different discussion, but look at the Mercosur agreement and all the opposition from farmers in the EU. They are extremely protectionist when it comes to agriculture, at least.

Yes the farmers are a very vocal and powerful minority.

They get more than 50% of their income from subsidies, are quite well off, but always find a reason to complain.

I was thinking more about stuff like "Buy American"-Regulations for public tenders. Stuff like that doesn't exist here

Well I can certainly understand them. Based on price tgey would not be able to compete and have half decent living wages so protectionism AND subsidies is a decent strategy to maintain local production which I feel allow a country / area to not lose a lever in international negociations.

The quotas for these products in the trade deal would have been very limited, and the opportunities for our industry far greater.

It was a small vocal minority that avoided benefit for the majority

Yes it's great for the EU, but not so great for the Mercosur, is it? The EU wants them to buy products from the EU, but if the Mercosur acted the same way as the EU does with regards to agriculture, would mean they would also "protect" their industries from "unfair EU competition" and no deal can be made at all.

If you want to have commerce, you need to give some to get some. Without agriculture being included, the EU would just take and not give anything. It used to work in the colonial times, but one would hope that is behind us now.

Apparently you aren't aware of the EU's deep regulatory protectionism and subsidies at both EU and country level. A small portion is legitimately about protecting consumers, but ultimately this stuff is all designed by and for EU industry.

Basically all economic regions get highly protectionist when it comes to key areas like agriculture, banking, steel production, energy, automotive manufacturing, etc.

On tariffs, the US is now higher, but tariffs are a tax that passes through overwhelmingly onto the consumer (by like 95%+). Given there's essentially no fully domestic US manufacturing supply chains and the US imports everything, it's a defacto VAT from the perspective of the consumer. The EU has VAT levels that are still much higher than the average US tariff level, which is a essentially a dampener on consumption.

But the VAT applies to all goods regardless where they are produced. So that's not a protectionist measure

Like American protectionism? Heck, America even prohibits its own companies to sell to the government if the president doesn't like them enough.

> But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts?

How? The largest providers that are trying to win devs are locked in a competition to get the devs to continue using the models for free!

The best way to win B2B contracts is to solve the problems that plague business, not those that plague devs. The devs are fickle, have no stickiness and will jump providers to the next free provider, to self-hosted, etc.

Selling to business using Mistral's approach is, I feel, just a good business plan.

"Giving away some credits for free, then making a loss on subscribers" is an absolutely terrible business plan.

As far as I understood the French president is pushing French most valuated companies to use Mistral. There can't be a more to down strategy :)

I had the same experience. It's even more confusing when you want to create an API key because they are separated by product, maybe?

no, the key is actually universal, you can't choose a specific product

It depends. The key for their vibe-cli is actually different. You need to get a separate key if you have a subscription and don't want to pay API usage prices.

That's the same everywhere. At least with the Chinese coding plans

>data staying in the EU

This is really why Mistral has any support.

The models are bottom barrel, but its the best Europe has...

Although you could use Chinese models on European servers.

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