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Don't sleep on Mistral. Highly underrated as a general service LLM. Cheaper, too. Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off. There are all kinds of specialized datasets and restricted access stores that can benefit from their approach. Especially in highly regulated EU.

Not everyone is obsessed with code generation. There is a whole world out there.

I also think that this is the best approach for businesses wanting to adopt AI to automate, streamline, etc their business.

The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.

If they can pull ahead in having the most number of pre-trained models (one for this ERP, one for that CRM, etc) and then being able to close sales to companies using these products and sell them on post-trained (give us your specific ERP customisations and we'll give you access to a model that is tailored to your business), then THAT is a moat.

But they need to do this without fanfare. Just close sales, and keep closing, basically. After all, even if other AI providers copy the process, the moat would already have been established for Mistral.

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> Their emphasis on bespoke modelling over generalized megaliths will pay off.

Isn't the entire deal with LLMs that they are trained as megaliths? How can bespoke modelling overcome the treasure trove of knowledge that megaliths can generically bring in, even in bespoke scenarios?

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Agreed. I’ve used their platform to train smaller, specialized models. Something I could have done in Codelab or some other tool, but their platform allows me to just upload a training set and as soon as it finishes I have a hosted model available at an endpoint. It obviously has some constraints compared to running the training yourself, but it also opens up the opportunity to way more people.
Indeed, but even for coding use cases, Vibe is more of a focused “refactor/ write this function” aid than “write me an app” and it can work locally. For me that’s a lot more valuable as an accelerator to my workflow where the developer stays in control and fully involved in the process.
I agree. Just started using it. Can you give some examples of fields you maybe even prefer Mistral?
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Yes, since it's not American, it will be the de-facto choice for most big European companies.
Why would that be? Most big EU companies use ms teams or google workspace, for example.
They use those because the decision to use them was made years ago. Things have changed since then
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Is this the best Grok alternative?
Any model is.
This sounds like an ideology based reply. Grok is underrated and I think has a better chance of long term success than most. The current growth strategy means (for me) their chat harness is not up to par for serious work.

Their API is consistently among the most used on OpenRouter. While I can’t vouch for it myself, I think this is a decent proxy for capability. You can definitely see glimmers of greatness in their chat interface, it just feels like the system prompts are focused on something that doesn’t interest me.

Grok is not SOTA, but its so obviously better than Mistral. Mistral is just some European patriotism or something.

Grok is nice for asking morally gray questions. ChatGPT will lie in these cases.

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