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Comment by greenleafone7 | Hacker News Reader

After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.

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Opposite advice. It's very useful to me for dev and general tasks.

Been using Claude in parallele, it's better not not that much, just 10x (or 100x ?) more expensive.

Sure, well for me it isn't. It has been awful for even toy tasks that opencode's free plan did without an issue. The general sentiment about it is that it is really bad. I wish I knew before paying.

Well, you lost 17 $. I'm not being sarcastic, that's not a lot for dev tasks.

Mistral's coding models aren't on par with current SOTA US and Chinese models if that's what you're referring to, but I rather like their OCR models.

> After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it

For OCR?

Codestral is pretty good for coding autocomplete. possibly better than even Cursor's

I assume you mean for coding, for which I would agree. But for OCR Mistral is SOTA :)

I am not totally following this area but the link from a commenter from above suggests that it is not SOTA but on the lower end (but still good): https://getomni.ai/blog/benchmarking-open-source-models-for-...

interesting... I have never seen such a benchmark before, where it forces the model to use a json schema for parsing a document. Sounds a bit counter intuitive to me, but I'm not that deep in the field. I usually just "ask" the model for information that is inside an image pdf. I haven't run any sophisticated benchmarks though...

No, they don't force the model to use a json schema, they simply use the model to extract the data, and then they feed that OCR result into the pipeline further to evaluate the OCR results against the ground truth, and this is where JSON schema is used, and also another model (gpt4o).

aaahhh...

what did you use it for and when?

The armies of people desperate to defend mistral, scouring the internet for any of the hundreds of negative posts made about it daily is pathetic. There's a reason it needs 'fanboys' and 'defenders'... it sucks. Id have loved to use a European alternative, but Europeans need to get serious and actually offer an alternative that has value other than "it's trash, but it has a Made in Europe badge".

Same, I got a refund 3 days later. It is unusable.

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