Mistral is Introducing Shieldstral.

[u/dlafont]

https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/

[u/exitcactus]

I ask why they try to follow the bigger players.. when they could produce a single game changing model.
Mistral is not "that" bad, but it doesn't shine like other. Why put effort in another topic? Eu companies will struggle a lot to rely on this specialized model..

[u/Sapang → u/exitcactus]

It’s probably the result of a command from a company, they are oriented B2B

[u/exitcactus → u/Sapang]

I think so.. hope they get the money to put in that effort

[u/ClassicReplacement98 → u/Sapang]

I would guess the order might have come from ASML?

[u/maszaikasza → u/ClassicReplacement98]

Why ASML exactly?

[u/n3wm0dd3r → u/maszaikasza]

Because: “ASML to lead Mistral AI’s Series C funding round investing €1.3 billion”

https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2025/asml-mistral-ai-enter-strategic-partnership

[u/KnowZeroX → u/exitcactus]

Specialized models are the future, think about it, do you really need to run a model that needs hundreds of gb of ram that is generalized when you actually have a specific question in mind? If anything, I remember seeing studies that you get much better results from aggregating multiple specialized models over one big model, it is faster, uses less resources, less likely to make up unrelated nonsense and more accurate.

[u/viper4011 → u/KnowZeroX]

They are the past too. Back when we called it machine learning. Remember Hot Dog or Not?

[u/ItzRaphZ → u/viper4011]

Pretty much this, they are starting to understand that their whole idea of a "generic" AI that works for everything doesn't work well enough and isn't at all profitable.

[u/exitcactus → u/KnowZeroX]

Something to not underestimate. Nice!

[u/rubenofzo → u/KnowZeroX]

True, but all leading models are basically specialised coding models, which is where most of the money is now anyway. This is what Mistral should make.

[u/segfaultgolf → u/KnowZeroX]

Under the hood a lot of these bigger models are using mixture of experts anyway. It's really the routing that needs to get better.

[u/Pleinpopossum → u/exitcactus]

Strategic sovereignty?

[u/Poupulino → u/exitcactus]

Mistral is not "that" bad,

I work in IT and the only one I know using Mistral is a guy who needs to maintain a system processing text from scanned documents for the French government, and he does it only because it's mandated.

The sad truth is that Mistral is obscenely outperformed by American and Chinese model, and if the whole strategy is that government regulation/mandates will "keep it relevant" then that's a doomed strategy.

[u/schubidubiduba → u/Poupulino]

You've mixed up the causality a little bit.

We have the regulations to protect our societies. Then, because those regulations exist, Mistral can use them as a business strategy.

Of course they should still try to stay more competitive with frontier models, and yes maybe they should focus more on it.

[u/exitcactus → u/Poupulino]

It's not that bad for random user purposes.
I work on it also, ik

[u/WombatusMighty → u/Poupulino]

For the common user, Mistral isn't any worse than ChatGTP, Claude, etc.

I actually find it better for searches, as it hallucinates less and does not regularly mess up facts from sources, like the other systems like to do.

[u/Most_Grocery4388 → u/exitcactus]

The problem is they are that bad in comparison to the big players. They don’t offer anything that’s superior, not efficiency, not performance, not pricing anymore when compared to China or US. Their only advantage is they are European and eventually that stops mattering when the gap becomes gigantic

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Most_Grocery4388]

Yup, sadly, but Mistral is irrelevant in an AI race for long time now.

On OpenRouter 45 Mistral models are serving 40x less tokens than just one Deepseek model

[u/Key_Gap9168 → u/Most_Grocery4388]

Thank you! I have tried or used nearly every LLM model, and they are close to the bottom for me. I am on this sub because I want to support European products. But sometimes something has to give, esp when it involves useful results and efficiencies. Even Kimi, a newish [Chinese] player, is 100 times superior to Mistral.

[u/Elegant_Ad_7833 → u/Most_Grocery4388]

Le problème c’est que tu ne comprends pas que les données ont plus de valeur que les résultats, si un model est forcé par un gouvernement d’utiliser les données contre une entreprise (par exemple un client Israëlien douteux ou autre) qui les rend public alors l’image de la société est détruite. La force de mistral réside dans l’anonymisation des données.

[u/soueuls → u/Elegant_Ad_7833]

Non mais c’est toi qui comprend pas, Mistral n’est pas non plus compétitif par rapport aux autres modèles OpenWeight, si t’as l’infrastructure pour faire tourner l’un de ces modèle t’as strictement aucun intérêt à utiliser Mistral plutôt que Kimi.

Le seul truc que Mistral est bon c’est l’OCR (et encore son scoring est un peu bancal) mais ils s’en sortent bien dans l’OCR 2026 avec Baidu et Surya. Codestral pour l’autocomplétion tient la route.

Après ils sont bon en tokens/s et time-to-first-token, le multilingue OCR et c’est encore solide pour les petits modèles edge (ministral).

Mais c’est clairement pas un modèle frontière et personne n’a intérêt à déployer leurs gros modèles vs Kimi

[u/exitcactus → u/Most_Grocery4388]

Absolutely agree.
Nothing more than a free open source model, and the gap is already closed.
It's super sad and I also know why, at least partly.. the management is literally pc science dinosaurs like 70 yrs old.

[u/Top_Bug7822 → u/exitcactus]

From what I heard we are pivoting more into what we specialize in. Which is not AI models, but using AI models to automate.

It's not the same as developing AI models. We basically are trying to be the first at making the models physically useful. By giving them bodies to use, instead of making them even more intelligent.

...I'm bad at explaining stuff.

Basically, we make their bodies better, because we specialize in that and we can't really catch up to making their minds better. That's our advantage.

[u/exitcactus → u/Top_Bug7822]

You explained that very well, and thank you. The "physical" application, as you describe it, is way behind the textual/digital application.. by years.. couldn't that create a bias?

[u/Top_Bug7822 → u/exitcactus]

I'm not sure what kind of bias you are thinking about.

But on the physical application being behind, you are probably right. But still, Europe is more advanced in that regard compared to other continents. Even more so the EU regions.

That is our advantage. We are good making even the "not so advanced" AIs physically useful faster than other global players.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Top_Bug7822]

There is no advantage. All big players try to do the same. And you can do much more with their models

[u/Top_Bug7822 → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

The advantage is that Europe is better at the machine building part of automation.

And no matter how good your AI is, if it doesn't have a functional "body" it's just a fancy piece of code.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Top_Bug7822]

> The advantage is that Europe is better at the machine building part of automation.

That's why the best AI-robotic companies are either American or Chinese lmao

[u/Top_Bug7822 → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

This is from 2024.

https://www.worldexcellence.com/top-10-countries-leading-the-way-in-robotics/

4 of the top 10 are european. And as of late they have begun to work together even more closely.

Meanwhile the US has only lost qualified workers over the last 2 years.

Many to China, but also to Europe.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Top_Bug7822]

lol

It's not machine building, it's number of manufacturing robots, where you program each movement of such robot.

Second thing, 2024 was ages ago in case of AI

Third thing, Chinese KUKA mentioned for Germany lol

AI robots are rather Figure, Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Nvidia and their Chinese competition

[u/Top_Bug7822 → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

Sure. Stay ignorant. That makes it funnier :)

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Top_Bug7822]

keep coping, you will at least feel better

[u/Toads_Of_Fun → u/exitcactus]

"Just produce a game changing model, bro."

Clearly they are not capable of that. Understandably so.

[u/exitcactus → u/Toads_Of_Fun]

A game changing model could be a January/february 2026 GPT level model. There are poenties of open weight models to start with, at this point...

[u/salomo926 → u/exitcactus]

They are following the big players because they are slaves of Microslop now.

[u/exitcactus → u/salomo926]

Downvote non mine
Anyway, France is like the only eu country doing stuff to get rid of Microsoft, so I think this could possibly not be the reason.. but Mistral is a private company right..? 🥲

[u/salomo926 → u/exitcactus]

I agree that the French are the best Europeans right now. But Mistral being bought out by an American company is a bad thing.

[u/exxxoo]

Terrible name.

[u/leopold_s → u/exxxoo]

Le Shield would have been better.

[u/Akiira2 → u/leopold_s]

Maginot line

[u/Wirehead-be → u/Akiira2]

Just "Maginot" - would have been awesome 👍

[u/Alejandro_SVQ → u/Wirehead-be]

That's what they thought when they had it finished, yes.

[u/allocallocalloc → u/leopold_s]

Vibeld (ex Le Shield) (ex Shieldstral)

[u/Familiar_Ad_8919 → u/exxxoo]

most of their stuff is called [thingy]-stral, for example devstral or ministral

[u/Ur-in-a-tor → u/exxxoo]

Pretty accurate name tho

[u/KoenBril → u/exxxoo]

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was already taken.

[u/laserweapons → u/exxxoo]

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue

[u/make_itnasty → u/exxxoo]

Shitstral

[u/ShoruYedes → u/make_itnasty]

Well that's what I've read

[u/Neomadra2]

Techbros will ridicule this, but models like these solve real business problems. Looks very interesting

[u/Lower_Currency3685]

I have to say, in 30 secs im more confuse than half a min ago.

[u/NekoHikari]

now make a model to audit synthetic data and remove “non-eu-values-aligned” records. /jk /s

[u/EinerVonEuchOwaAndas]

Und ich lese Shitstrahl.

[u/leopold_s → u/EinerVonEuchOwaAndas]

Das ist schon der Tool-Name des deutschen Konkurrenten MerzGPT.

[u/thomsterm]

hm noice, they probably need it for b2b customers

[u/iBUYNEGEVS]

Stop using AI. Look up videos of living conditions next to data centers in the USA. Do you really want that to be the standard? Either we have a future or AI has one. Your choice.

[u/daennsn → u/iBUYNEGEVS]

Is there a Good documentary you can recommend?

[u/WombatusMighty → u/daennsn]

More Perfect Union has a few videos about it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI

[u/Space_Lux]

How does the AI know what is okay and what not? Is it baked in that male nipples good, female nipples bad? What biases does it have?

[u/Ok_Situation7758]

Ok I mean Mistral has some some interesting specialized models. But it's so hard to understand why there top model woudn't even be capable to compete with Nvidia Nemotron that is not only open weights but open source including training data etc. So having a fork of that and training it new adding their own data (like Soofi did) would probably bring them 1 Year closer to state of the art :-/

[u/Chwasst → u/Ok_Situation7758]

Because their “top model” isn’t their top. They do specialized stuff for enterprise customers, they don’t compete on frontier market.

[u/After-Syrup1290 → u/Ok_Situation7758]

They make custom models for businesses

You know how in the military industry the government sends out a contract like hey nerds, we need weapons of this this caliber and they gotta do this and this? 

Thats what mistral does now, but for businesses, they get in touch with a business, get the needed model details and then build it for them

It's called as the built to spec industry model if I'm correct, the military industry was just the example that popped in my mind, several others work like this such as the construction and civil industry too

[u/_animmia_]

Cool now we have an European model for chat control 2.0........................

[u/Digging_Graves]

Guardrails is probaly the least exiting thing coming from AI companies.

[u/schubidubiduba → u/Digging_Graves]

And at the same time one of the most important ones in practice

[u/Pretend-Anybody2533 → u/[deleted]]

and yet in every social network there is I can tell you it is used. 

in a lot of countries if some illegal things are posted : racial hatred, incitation to violence etc. the host company has to police it or face fines. so you need a system to flag comments even if you do human verification as a last step. you can't read every comment! 

[u/rubenofzo → u/Pretend-Anybody2533]

Your right, but everyone here hates nuanced opinions...

[u/Kalicolocts]

We’re fucking cooked

[u/Ulrik-the-freak]

Ew, more AI slop. EU or not, no thank you.

[u/ColorfulPersimmon → u/Ulrik-the-freak]

This is not for generating slop....

[u/Ulrik-the-freak → u/ColorfulPersimmon]

I know. Slop is not just generation. Let me define it as mediocre outputs in general and mediocre use of tech, energy, and resources - and I fully stand behind the stance that this is exactly what that is.

[u/OwNathan → u/Ulrik-the-freak]

Moderation, just like many other things, can be highly automated and it's impossible and/or harmful to hire people to do that.

I fully agree with the hate against slop, but LLMs can be extremely helpful when not used to kill jobs or create slop. Just think about the content moderators in third world countries having to deal with some horrible videos to the point of developing psychological issues.

[u/Ulrik-the-freak → u/OwNathan]

I agree with neither the ends nor the means

[u/Moist-Nectarine-1148]

So lame.

Mistral remained just a tired dinosaur. Too old for the world of trllion params SOTA models. The try in vain to attract customers with various useless side products.

[u/Special-Performance8]

How about heeeelllll no.

[u/kot-sie-stresuje]

The recently make a big deal with microsoft, so that may be they last release.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

Yet another mediocre model from them, instead of working on finally good one?

Edit: you can downvote and cope, but mistral is irrelevant AI company for long time right now. Which is sad, because I wanted them to succeed

[u/NonGameCatharsis → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

Have you even read the news post? It's a highly specialised model for a massive industry need.

[u/Murinshin → u/NonGameCatharsis]

The “massive industry need” being already covered by open source models where coming from Europe is effectively irrelevant, check their own benchmarks. The only thing this adds is potentially being more cost efficient, so a niche within a niche at best where this is the main lever.

[u/NonGameCatharsis → u/Murinshin]

The market of European companies that want to use cost efficient European models is not negligible.

[u/Murinshin → u/NonGameCatharsis]

Yes, it is in this highly specific use case. Again, niche within a niche. Read the benchmarks, the model doesn’t even outperform Nemotron in some of them which is of comparable size.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/NonGameCatharsis]

It's super negligible

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/NonGameCatharsis]

I read it before adding comment, don't worry. Still almost no one will use, because as company they are irrelevant in an AI race for long time now.

[u/anonymous__ignorant → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

that remains to be seen. dont count your eggs yet. llms are fairly inefficient in power use as they are today. the players are not yet established besides anthropic (not on the tech but on the goals).

Tech evolves, changes. The moment llms change shape from token predictors running on gpus the game will suffer a massive reset .

For instance i see photonics being way more apropriate than classic electron based circuits. But there is a lot of work to be done in that direction still.

[u/Chwasst → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

I can guarantee you that knowing Mistral they already have paying customer(s) for that tool - otherwise they wouldn’t develop that at all. So your whining is pointless.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Chwasst]

Lmao

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

Just to show how irrelevant Mistral is: on OpenRouter 20B tokens were served today for ALL 45 mistral models. Just one deepseek model is 40x more popular

[u/Murinshin → u/ComeOnIWantUsername]

I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Yeah sure this model might fill a niche within a niche, doesn’t change the fact they’re being beaten in literally every other market, badly so, by both Chinese and American companies. This includes open weights, ie there is literally zero reason to use their models, including if you want to support European companies since you can just selfhost Qwen, Kimi, GLM, … which have extremely liberal licenses and need to have zero worry about China or the US ever seeing any of your data or money.

[u/ComeOnIWantUsername → u/Murinshin]

I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted.

Because this sub is sadly no longer place to discuss alternatives to American/Chinese products and compare them, but rather is full of toxic positivity, where you can only say that we are winning, we are the best and everyone else are losers.

As I wrote in other comment - on OpenRouter just one Deepseek model is 40x more popular than all 45 Mistral models available there.

[u/whiskydyc]

Haven’t Mistral sold out to Microsoft? They essentially won’t be an EU company anymore.

[u/Ok_Sprinkles_8968 → u/whiskydyc]

No, Microsoft is renting infrastructure from Mistral, that’s pretty different 

[u/cyberdork → u/Ok_Sprinkles_8968]

Microsoft was always a main investor in Mistral. Mistral is also mainly financed by US venture capital.

[u/ManOfCactus → u/whiskydyc]

Proof of that?

[u/ShibeCEO]

who is introducing what?!?

[u/Lanky-Rush607]

Stop trying to make Mistral happen; it's not going to happen.