Posted by Anon84 9/4/2025
I find them to be a pretty good over-all model although not at the bleeding edge. Their responses are very fast. Qwen is better with code/log analysis in my experience but general coding questions hasn't presented any problems.
Mistral's agent framework is pretty good too. You can make agents very easily with the le chat side or if you want to have more deep control, you get le platforme access and agents you make there can be used in le chat without costing against API usage.
Of the AI products I've been working with, and I've been trying a lot of them, Mistral is one I plan on keeping when I reduce myself down to 2-3 I want to stick around.
But when it comes to researching information is consistently among the worst performers in my comparisons.
Generally the order is Opus 4.1 > Perplexity > Gemini Pro >> GPT 5 >> Qwen.
I really like perplexity and if you get it free it's hard to justify spending 100$/month.
Few recent examples:
- find me public companies listed in Poland that have the best z-index of dividend yield, payout ratio and earnings growth
- list the most important psychological tendencies and biases that crew resource management tries to address
My perception using them is that they have comparable models to OpenAI and others when it comes to general use 'chat' tasks, but they don't match something like gpt-5 Pro or high thinking when you need something more powerful.
Perhaps the problem is that you need to be competing right at the frontier, or not at all. I put Cohere in a similar bucket.
A year ago I wanted to use and like Mistral, mostly because it was an upstart competitor to OpenAI. Yet I found its coding ability sadly lacking. I haven’t tried since. I also have seen them on the HN front page very rarely. I’m curious too how well they stand up these days.
A bit of a shame if they're going to launch these connectors that the model isn't suitable for them.
From a similar generation all I can think about is Homer Simpson trying to put together a BBQ grill, from only the french instructions: “Le Grille?? What the hell is Le Grille??”
You watch the OpenAI launch videos and its a surprising variety of Europeans accents talking about all the value they're creating in the US, instead of back home, simply due to the more favorable business/investment policies of the US.
My pet theory is, outside of the silly regulatory stance, the real reason Europe can never compete in each wave of tech (mainframe > pc > internet > mobile > social > AI > etc.) is government pension systems hoovering up all private capital and investing it into european governments (bonds) instead of european businesses (equities).
Centralizing the financial assets of an entire country, subjecting it to the whims of politics thus requiring it be invested it into extremely low risk bonds instead of a larger portion in European equity indexes or even a tiny portion in venture capital has created this situation: https://i.redd.it/fxks3skmvt4e1.png
Yes, a vast majority of VC funds lose money. Hence why it's bucketed in 'alternatives' and never a major part of pension portfolios. But the small group of winners literally create the future tax base to fund the social welfare system to continue existing (not to mention the future military tech which it turns out is useful when your neighbors get hostile). Not taking the risk means you never get the reward.
If Europe put even 1-2% of their $5T in pension assets into venture...even grossly mismanaged Softbank style...I find it hard to imagine you wouldn't accidentally create a few $100+ Billion companies in 10-20 years. More important would be creating the startup ecosystem for taking the rest of the worlds capital into these ventures as a multiplier.
- The US has been a single market for a much longer time than the EU, and the EU still is not a single market, primarily due to language barriers (Germany, France, and Italy are large enough markets to have their own localized, but slightly worse SaaS options)
- European societies are more arranged around the common good and have lower income differences between people and super-wealthy individuals by design. The US is built around being the place where talented people can make the most money out of their skills, which results in many people worldwide choosing it as the place to go to, as the talent market is a global one.
- European values tend to value making as much money as possible or competing and being the winner less, which results in people grinding less and being happy when they become rich enough to focus on other things.
Western Europe and the US had essentially the same level of government safety nets (and government spending and economic growth) from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Who do you think started all of the European industrial giants that are still globally competitive today? Europe had no problem competing in the industrial revolution, if these were actually European values there would be no competitive European industry like there is no competitive European tech. It's only the digital revolution that Europe has struggled with.
Even now where I don't think that holds true so much (there are small pools of talent elsewhere, e.g. Stockholm is hot right now), a good senior engineer in Europe may be able to get €100k, and you are looking at 2 or 3 times in the US, so it's still attractive to relocate.
Cultural differences (mainly language barriers) made it hard for somewhere like that to evolve in Europe. Yes everyone in tech speaks English, but if you move to say Poland and want to rent an apartment or see a doctor, you would have had a hard time without at least a basic understanding of Polish. It's completely different from someone moving from Texas to SFO.
Ironically all the immigration of Russian speakers over the last few years has actually helped embrace English in these countries, as for nationalistic reasons they don't want to embrace Russian.
In the 2000s and early 2010s London was the tech hub of Europe (English speaking, many high ranking universities in the vicinity), but Brexit f***d that up.
I would not dismiss the contribution of European companies to each one of this domains so quickly though. Especially on the mobile side, there was a time where Nokia/Siemens/Ericsson/Alcatel were big names in that industry.
Can your theory explain then the difference between San Francisco/Bay area and the rest of the United States? Perhaps it is California's generous tax policies compared to say Texas?
It has nothing to do with policies, or pension system or whatever, and all to do with market size: when building an American company, you have access to the whole US from the start, then you can build an international product (with all the hassle that comes with it). If you're “European”, you have 27 different markets to address and except your own, none of them is easier for you to get than for an American company.
The second hottest tech market after the US (and not that much behind) is China, and don't tell me that's because they have favorable business policies, ask Jack Ma! It's literally a totalitarian state where CEOs can get abducted if the CCP thinks they're getting too powerful. Talk about incentivizing risk taking. But that's a market of a billion people, the second highest GPD on the planet, and American companies can't monopolize every markets because they are being heavily restrained by the government.
The only way for Europe to thrive technologically, would be to close the doors to the American corporations, that's how you can have Alibaba or VKontakte.
I'm not holding my breath though.
Government spending makes up a smaller % of Chinese GDP than in the US, so definitionally their economy is more privatized than the US economy. China is at 33%, US at 36%, Europe is at 50%.
For every Jack Ma, there's a million other Chinese businesses flourishing in every niche imaginable with very little oversight from the CCP.
Also, “government spendings” isn't a good proxy for how much a government intervenes in the economy, especially when the said government can just order businesses to do this or that without handing money to them.
Definitionally, it's the percentage of economic activity that is dictated by decentralized private market actors vs. centralized government ones.
All stats are imperfect reflections of reality. But name a better one for this particular issue.
But I'd just like to point out how silly it is to dismiss the person's concerns by claiming we should all just agree to be reductive because it's easiest to discuss a single metric. It's certainly easiest to use this single metric to make the discussion about your conclusion, though, if that's what you were aiming for. I hope not, though.
Chinese utilities are all counted as SOEs, regulated utility monopolies in the US aren't, even though defacto they are government entities. The US likes to brand everything as more capitalist (just as China likes to brand everything as more communist), so this distorts the picture.
If we're just trying to capture the full picture of money flows in an economy, and whether each incremental currency unit is responding to market signals or not, % of GDP that is government spending is more reliable imo.
It's far easier to compare internationally and less fuzzy to calculate, given there's much more data on it globally.
