Hacker News Reader

Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

There are so models that beats all of Mistral models, plus you can run many of them locally. Why would anyone run Mistral?

View on HN

To have at least a choice of using a European trained model. Downloadable weights is not open source. Mistral is able to respond to any regulatory queries about training data and concerns.

Haha, the answer is "european regulation"?

Pretty much. Europe is basically not at all involved in the AI race and is reliant on US and China.

To be honest, I have a hard time noticing differences with Claude (in Kiro) and Mistral Vibe, at least with what I use them for. They simply feel like talking to the exact same thing.

Sovereignty. Not everything is about performance.

Mistral OCR is really good and their small models are great for simple translations, I use them regularly.

Of course I’m not always on the most bleeding edge forefront of the latest hyped model so there might be better alternatives, but I’m happy with what they provide

Their OCR did worse at reading a 40 page PDF of printed text than tesseract for me, I just paid $2 for useless output

Qwen 3.8 27B absolutely demolishes Mistral best offerings at coding, and you only need a 5090 or 2x3090 to run it.

French

Possibly because Mistral is a French-based company, so EU companies can cut the American umbilical cord a bit more.

EU companies can download GLM or Kimi-K3 and get way better performance, though? I don't see any case for using a Mistral model when much better open models exist.

Because not everyone has the infrastructure to run that with better performance? Anyway, Mistral serves GLM 5.2 through their global and European endpoints, so if you wanted to leverage their services and use a more powerful open model, that seems to be an option.

Most people don't want a second job trying to figure out self-hosted AI stuff.

The OCR stuff is quite usable. Their models perform good at some very basic tasks, so I use them to diversify. But their current model lineup is really terrible.

Sovereignty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com