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Comment by seb_lz | Hacker News Reader

I'm using mistral-medium-2508 for some text transformation operations. It's giving me better results than mistral-large for my use cases. Looking forward to testing this new model, although I'm not sure if it's really meant at replacing the previous medium model since it's a lot more expensive and presented more as a coding / agentic model (mistral-medium-2508 was priced $0.4/$2 per 1M tokens, mistral-medium-3.5 is $1,5/$7.5).

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I actually use Mistral Large to go through some large text chunks (in production). It gives about the same level of results as Sonnet, while being 90% cheaper. Definitely wouldn't use it for coding, but for this text-analyzing task it has been great. Much better than all the latest Chinese models, for example.

So I was waiting for this release and it's... 5x more expensive than the latest Mistral Large. So now I'm worried they'll pull the plug on the cheap Large when their releases roll over to that one.

Why does this matter if the model is open? It can be offered by competitive third-party providers, there's no rug pull.

Right now it's really not offered by third parties. I found it via a single provider (BitDeer). I'm not sure I'd trust them with my customers' data. Also, considering the model is getting a bit old, I wouldn't expect them to keep offering it forever.

Anyhow, competition is fierce. I'll have some model I can use in the future, even if it's not dirt cheap like current Mistral Large is.

Yeah I use Mistral Large for a lot of formatting work. For this one use case of mine, it outperforms frontier models by a significant margin. I've found tons of use cases for mistral small as well.

I'd love to use Mistral for more tasks, but Mistral Large doesn't quite cut it for all tasks. So on the one hand, I'm excited there is another model, and presumably more performant based on the price? But the fact it's a "Medium" and 5x the price of the Large definitely concerns me.

The entire release is also about Vibe Coding, and so I'm not even sure if this model is applicable outside of coding, or even worth testing.

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