Mistral is an interesting AI company because they clearly have a contrarian business strategy to the other AI labs. They're also landing big customers in Europe for the right reasons. People dump on them because they're not benchmaxxxing which is pretty shortsighted - do you really want to be in a benchmark arms race with China, or do you want to make money and deploy sovereign AI compute in Europe?

I get worried when thinking about Mistral because they make mediocre models and I don't think they will be able to defeat their competition.

I really hope that Mistral will catch up. I'm left wondering why so many Chinese labs manage to be competitive.

Perhaps Mistral has too high moral standards to keep up?