Will you do anything differently knowing this? Does the risk of LLMs being unaffordable to you in the near future make you wary about losing the skills?
Open Models are currently within reach for most of the kind of writing I do
I still decide what and why it generates what it does, I just don't do it manually
I'm not super worried, either I still do the last leg of the work, or I go back an abstraction level with my prompts and work there
Yes, they do come back faster than learning from scratch. However, what’s possibly worrying is that our brains atrophy some faculties if we decided to skip the learning part altogether.
Discord annoys me with this. I tried to ask a question about GrapheneOS on reddit and they auto deleted it and said we use discord now. I don't have discord so I signed up and can't post until I verify my email. So I verified a burner and don't have permission to post in that channel. A couple of days later I did, but the motivation had passed.
It's so strange to put your interactions behind a walled garden that demands verification, especially for something like GOS. But even then, making people wait a day or so without telling them is such an antipattern
When X premium came out they said if I paid my tweets would be boosted more. I didn't pay, and my account with a few hundred followers went from 100ish views per average tweet to 10.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
This is so weird to me. So many tech writers seemed to suddenly decide this was a possibility at the same time, and based on what? How much energy was wasted on this thought experiment? And if the US does pull the plug and disconnects Europe, how likely do you think it is that you'll be unaffected?
I'm a resident of a country regularly mentioned by the commander in chief who has recently bombed a head-of-state and his family with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and captured the head of state of a neighbouring state by military means.
All without congressional approval. And apparently without the US population knowing about it.
Why risk using US tech?
It costs more, and the people running it likely may not be my friends
In your case, being cut off is a real possibility. In the EU case it's just larping and the author of every one of those articles is probably still using Claude, cloudflare and a dozen other companies.
I've tried Mistral a few times, at first it seemed promising (though lagging) but at some point it seems like they stopped focusing on AI and shifted their focus to being a mouthpiece for EU policy and pushing for regulation. I can't really take any of their announcements seriously anymore.
A couple of weeks ago they were calling for a European AI tax to pay creatives.
Recordable CDs involved individuals making copies. AI is run by a couple of dozen people who give full access to other people's work, metered by the syllable.
It was never legal for massive corporations to record other people's work on CDs and sell them; that's the opposite of copyright. The comparison is absurd.
I lived and studied in France. So it's only natural for me to try out Mistral's every major updates. I had the same sentiment with you, that their models were just a bit lagging. But on the other hand, I understand their shift. Their value is not in SOTA coding, math, or puzzle solving performance in my opinion. They will catch up. To me it makes sense that they focus on something else, how to scale through talents and propagate their models with policies in Europe.
I respectfully disagree. Until very recently they never had a model that came close to Pareto competitiveness at their price points. Recently theh released Mistral Small 4 and for the first time it's competitive.
I used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors.
I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....
As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.
"I sent money to the god knows how many trillion parameters fully closed source machine built on billions of dollars and it worked better than the model that I can self host from the guys next door"
yeah, no shit ? All you're saying is that you're happily locking yourself in to models you have zero control over and that Anthropic can fuck you over at any time.
However, yes, Mistral is not in the business of providing you with a perfect, general purpose model. They fine tune from their base models for specific tasks.
Mistral OCR 3 isn't open weights and isn't available for download. It's only available via API, or to companies via paid consulting with Mistral.
"For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option. This ensures that sensitive or classified information remains secure within your own infrastructure, providing compliance with regulatory and security standards. If you would like to explore self-deployment with us, please let us know."
I used their OCR against a few hundred page PDF that was printed text but missing the OCR. It cost me $5 and was useless, it did worse than tesseract. That's how all my experience with mistral is
The reputation thing is bull by the way, you don't need to spam people continually to get your email delivered - otherwise every normal people would know this was true.
Of course you have an A+ reputation, the service assumes people want to receive your crap
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