alt Hacker NewsThere's a lot of criticism of Mistral being unable to compete with large model, and that's fair. But I think it dismisses what Mistral is actually doing, which is making specific capabilities available at high quality in tiny models.
I do a lot of OCR, file analysis, stuff like that. I use Mistral for that. I put 100$ into my account, and it just runs for a year without any worries about the amount of requests I make, because the cost is minuscule. That's valuable, even if it doesn't compete with Opus 4.8.
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But how does it compete on OCR? I find that having good quality at a cheap price is more niche than having the best quality at 10x the cheap price, because for most use cases you want to pay a bit more if it saves you mistakes later.
Stupid Europoors, optimizing for making a good product, instead of optimizing for making as much money as possible /s
I'm not sure the "a year of document processing for under 100 USD/y" is such as great thing as you think it is (at least not for European competitiveness)... It means Mistral is essentially setting a revenue ceiling very low. OCR is a commodity at this point, and open source models, AWS, etc already do it out of the box.
Plus, you can't really build loyalty on a 100 USD/Y price tag. Since there are no switching costs holding them back, those buyers will leave the moment somebody offers a lower rate. An easily cloned, low cost tool with zero customer lock in is not a business. It is a feature.
That might sound great for the buyer (you), but it is a terrible strategy if we want a European company to compete long term against global competitors on actual product merit instead of just regulatory arbitrage.
i would argue it is more valuable