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Comment by Grimblewald | Hacker News Reader

Got curious, sign up, add money to account, try to use. Can't, it's a labs model. Fine, let's enable labs. Can't, unspecified error. Fine, lets contact customer support as instructed, can't no customer support, just a half-assed FAQ, that seems vibe-coded and searched poorly, totally irrelevant answers coming up for all queries tried. Then it hit me:

If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?

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> If AI makes good customer support, then why does no AI company use theirs to provide customer support?

They do! E.g. Cursor. See earlier discussions like "Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations"[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012

thanks! I hate it!

No one ever thought it made good customer support. It makes cheap customer support, and quite a lot of companies already have shitty customer support because they don't care about it being good, so they're thrilled to get to cut costs further.

It's "good" from the perspective of a company that's annoyed to have to spend money on actually fixing things.

I laughed and cried at this comment. It's so uncannily EU. Just spent 18 months landing an EU enterprise contract. Signed today and sent it back and got an automated message 'sorry will be on vacation til end of July...' This is the fourth vacation emails I got since corresponding with this contact window for the past 1 year.

Yes, we have more vacation in the EU than people in the US.

Eh, Europe has some great service cultures. (There was a recent comment citing an article contrasting its furniture and tech industries I’m having trouble finding.)

European tech’s service culture is just distinctly and notoriously terrible, even within Europe.

It's absolutely possible for individual employees to have generous vacations, while at the same time maintaining a continuously staffed support function.

it's more like nothing even happens in summer.

A lot happens, just not at work.

How is people having reasonable work place environments related to shit customer support and companies trying to optimize for reducing costs? Seems highly unrelated.

launches suck in the US too. See: every single AAA game launch ever

That's frustrating and odd because I can use the model for free (have never connected any form of payment)

Really? I get a 403 that I must enable Lab models on https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy. When I try to do that, it gives "There was an error trying to update the Labs setting."

Do you have that Labs setting enabled? When I contacted support, they said "enabling Labs models isn't available for self-serve activation on standard individual accounts." Do you have a different type of account?

These guys don't answer emails. Same for qwant.

Sample of two, but I'm assuming french companies don't like to being contacted n English.

If only they had access to a world class translation system, they could auto translate between languages effortlessly :)

They're just offended by people not using their product :D

Wasn't there a thread recently, about them disappointingly being also just a US company, just with an office in France?

Further down someone said the support is great and they respond within the day.

I did get a refund quite quickly, after I finally figured out how to contact their support, which in some stroke of cosmic humor took deepseek to figure out because using their website left my trapped in a dead-end loop. Asking mistral for help lead to links that all 404'd or the same useless help section / faq page.

they are working on LeChaton fat

You got the authentic European customer support. In America the customer is king and in Europe the customer is shit

Yea, because the tech gigants are known to have a good support. You won’t be talking to a real human in Google, Facebook, OpenAi if you are just a normal consumer/tiny business.

This isn’t the first time. I’m amazed at how they manage to fumble releases over and over …

Because that AI will either expose their business or it will be so nerfed it’s useless.

Atleast the UI looks nice. But I'm having trouble navigating it.

“Don’t get high on your own supply” - I think it’s Microsoft’s motto.

Mostly political, economic, and social ramifications.

Fixed, sorry for that!

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