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Posted by pember 23 hours ago

Mistral AI Releases Forge(mistral.ai)
689 points | 174 comments
kioleanu 12 hours ago|
I like Mistral, it hits the exact sweet spot between cost and my data staying in the EU, withouth a significant drop in quality, but man are their model naming conventions confusing af. They mention they have a model called Devstral 2, which is neither Codestral nor Devestral. I want to use it, but the api only lists devstral-2512, devstral-latest, devstral-medium-latest, devstral-medium-2507, devstral-small, devstral-small-2507.

I think, devstral-latest should be it, no? So I write to support and get an answer 12 hours later that says oh, no, devstral 2 is definetely called devstral 2 and then a page of instructions on how to set it up in Intellij... generated with AI. The screens it is refering to don't exist and never did.

IanCal 9 hours ago||
I got really lost on their site, but to help a bit according to their model page

devstral-2512 devstral-latest and devstral-medium-latest are all devstral 2 https://docs.mistral.ai/models/devstral-2-25-12

labs-devstral-small-2512 and devstral-small-latest are devstral small 2

devstral-medium-2507 is devstral 1.0

and devstral-small-2507 is devstral small 1.1

kioleanu 9 hours ago||
wow, thank you, this is great. I was thinking they should have a page like this, but I couldn't find myself.
Manfred 10 hours ago|||
I had the same experience. It's even more confusing when you want to create an API key because they are separated by product, maybe?
kioleanu 10 hours ago||
no, the key is actually universal, you can't choose a specific product
lis 9 hours ago||
It depends. The key for their vibe-cli is actually different. You need to get a separate key if you have a subscription and don't want to pay API usage prices.
hermanzegerman 7 hours ago||
That's the same everywhere. At least with the Chinese coding plans
newswasboring 10 hours ago|||
I have a general impression they are not interested too much in individual devs and making it suite their workflow. They want to be a B2B company and deliver a custom workflow per company.

Or it can just be a Google like problem where a big company one part doesn't talk to the other.

soco 9 hours ago|||
But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts? Or they think golf courts are enough for success? Okay they might be right here, but still they make it so confusing for no obvious reason.
MidnightRider39 8 hours ago|||
In my experience devs rarely have anything to say in B2B contracts. At best they can recommend a solution to the decision maker, but in almost all deals i was a part of they didn’t have any influence on the final decision. I wish it were otherwise but alas
lelanthran 7 hours ago||||
> But wouldn't winning devs be a neat helping point in winning b2b contacts?

How? The largest providers that are trying to win devs are locked in a competition to get the devs to continue using the models for free!

The best way to win B2B contracts is to solve the problems that plague business, not those that plague devs. The devs are fickle, have no stickiness and will jump providers to the next free provider, to self-hosted, etc.

Selling to business using Mistral's approach is, I feel, just a good business plan.

"Giving away some credits for free, then making a loss on subscribers" is an absolutely terrible business plan.

R0m41nJosh 3 hours ago||||
As far as I understood the French president is pushing French most valuated companies to use Mistral. There can't be a more to down strategy :)
philipallstar 7 hours ago||||
Also EU protectionism itself might be enough.
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago|||
Like American protectionism? Heck, America even prohibits its own companies to sell to the government if the president doesn't like them enough.
hermanzegerman 7 hours ago|||
Where is EU protectionist?

I feel we are way less protectionist than most other Economic Regions. Including the USA, which are very protectionist but always claim otherwise

brabel 3 hours ago|||
Well different discussion, but look at the Mercosur agreement and all the opposition from farmers in the EU. They are extremely protectionist when it comes to agriculture, at least.
hermanzegerman 2 hours ago||
Yes the farmers are a very vocal and powerful minority.

They get more than 50% of their income from subsidies, are quite well off, but always find a reason to complain.

I was thinking more about stuff like "Buy American"-Regulations for public tenders. Stuff like that doesn't exist here

prmoustache 1 hour ago||
Well I can certainly understand them. Based on price tgey would not be able to compete and have half decent living wages so protectionism AND subsidies is a decent strategy to maintain local production which I feel allow a country / area to not lose a lever in international negociations.
philipallstar 7 hours ago||||
Well, if every big company gets a giant EU fine for, say, preinstalling a web browser in an OS, except for EU companies, that could make it easier for the EU companies.
sofixa 6 hours ago||
Every company would get fined for anticompetitive behaviour, regardless of where are based.
wqaatwt 3 hours ago||
Well yes, but because there are approximately zero EU tech companies that can be affected by these fines and regulations there is very little political pushback against them.

In a certain sense it’s a way for EU to clawback at least a small slice of all that money flowing to the US.

hermanzegerman 2 hours ago|||
Why should there be pushback against antitrust measures?

It's what keeps markets alive

sofixa 3 hours ago|||
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2023/personali...
pembrook 3 hours ago|||
Apparently you aren't aware of the EU's deep regulatory protectionism and subsidies at both EU and country level. A small portion is legitimately about protecting consumers, but ultimately this stuff is all designed by and for EU industry.

Basically all economic regions get highly protectionist when it comes to key areas like agriculture, banking, steel production, energy, automotive manufacturing, etc.

On tariffs, the US is now higher, but tariffs are a tax that passes through overwhelmingly onto the consumer (by like 95%+). Given there's essentially no fully domestic US manufacturing supply chains and the US imports everything, it's a defacto VAT from the perspective of the consumer. The EU has VAT levels that are still much higher than the average US tariff level, which is a essentially a dampener on consumption.

hermanzegerman 2 hours ago||
But the VAT applies to all goods regardless where they are produced. So that's not a protectionist measure
newswasboring 9 hours ago|||
To me it's obvious because the size of companies they are targeting (ASML being an obvious one). I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.
wqaatwt 3 hours ago|||
> being made not purely on tech reasons.

As if that’s not true in the US (not just government contracts but VC in general as well)…

sofixa 6 hours ago|||
> I think golf course marketing works well in the EU context when decisions are being made not purely on tech reasons.

It's not like b2b sales is more technical merit based, individual contributor led, elsewhere.

It's always the same, depending on the field individual contributors can have some flexibility on picking tools (so a developer in a mid sized company would be able to pick whatever, an accountant probably would be more constrained, meanwhile a developer at a big bank would not have any choice). But for strategic software choices, that impact the whole company, where standardisation makes sense or is even mandatory to get actual value out of it, you need to sell to high level decision makers, not individual contributors. A CTO or a VP of X can decide to buy and mandate the implementation of something as impactful, workflow changing and potentially time and money saving as a company wide AI platform. A dev can't.

kioleanu 10 hours ago|||
you might be correct. for example, they have an intellij plugin that allows integration without the AI Assistant, but it is only available for Enterprise customers
butILoveLife 7 hours ago||
>data staying in the EU

This is really why Mistral has any support.

The models are bottom barrel, but its the best Europe has...

Although you could use Chinese models on European servers.

ogou 14 hours ago||
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.

lelanthran 12 hours ago||
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.

Lapel2742 10 hours ago|||
> The problem they have is that this is not a moat - their approach is easily reproducible.

My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.

lelanthran 10 hours ago|||
> My 2ct: Currently the moat may be that they are not US-American which is not reproducible by any of the US alternatives.

I hope you are right (I am in the process of finalising a product and one of the top-5 selling points contains "outside the jurisdiction of the US"), but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.

Lapel2742 9 hours ago||
> but in my experience, companies only pay lip service to ethics unless it hits their bottom line.

Sure, Mistral AI is certainly not the market leader and probably never will be but we're not talking about being a market leader but about having a moat.

I instantly believe you when you tell me that many companies do not care. On the other hand there are companies that do. At least partially: ASML, Stellantis, AXA, BNP Paribas, the French ministry of defense, Helsing, SNCF, ... are all Mistral AI customers.

Bombthecat 4 hours ago||||
Meh, I feel like we are in the "cloud is bad phase" all over again.

Companies will use US ai models without issues in a few years.

drstewart 10 hours ago||||
This moat doesn't seem to be much of a moat considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage - except DeepSeek, which would be a strange choice for Europeans looking for data sovereignty.
lelanthran 9 hours ago|||
> This moat doesn't seem to be much of a moat considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage - except DeepSeek, which would be a strange choice for Europeans looking for data sovereignty.

Hang on, where are you getting the numbers from? I looked and I couldn't find any numbers on enterprises who opened their wallets for custom-trained models.

I looked, and because I believed that it might be a good business opportunity to explore, I did spend a bit of time trying to find numbers. I came away with the feeling that the winner in the AI space is going to be whoever successfully whitelabels their offering.

Right now that is Mistral, I think.

Lapel2742 10 hours ago||||
> considering a non-US model doesn't even crack the top 5 by usage

How do you measure "usage" in an enterprise/commercial context where no data on usage is available to you? I don't expect Mistral AI to make it's money on OpenRouter.

hermanzegerman 7 hours ago|||
They offer self-hosted models for big corporate customers. I would also expect those serious about the security of their data to use that option. So you would never get the usage of those customers
rvnx 7 hours ago||
If you are a company based in Europe it is silly to give your data security and privacy to a company based in Europe.

If you are in Iran, you don't want to give your data to your government.

If you are in France, you don't want to give your data to your government.

etc

If you are in France, and you host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong, well good luck for the authorities to get it.

If you host it in "secure France", on the paper you will have more privacy and laws behind you, but in reality you are jumping into the mouth of the shark.

This is why governments are promoting: "yes yes, host here don't worry, we will protect you"

bob001 5 hours ago|||
> well good luck for the authorities to get it.

"We want your data on X, here;'s a warrant."

"No."

"You are now under arrest for contempt of court."

People have some oddly silly views on what government can and can't do to people living in their territories.

And companies really really don't care if the government has their data.

> host your e-mails in a datacenter in Hong-Kong

Now China has it, gives it a competitor in China and your market share drops like a stone. Congrats! Great choice!

hermanzegerman 2 hours ago||||
It's not about government but about trade secrets...
sofixa 6 hours ago|||
This flat out isn't true. Police forces / investigative authorities have been collaborating with one another since 1923: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol . We have tons of examples of this working for the digital world as well (like Proton complying with Swiss legal orders at the behest of non-Swiss police forces for illegal activities in other countries).

The trick is to host your data in a country with a strong rule of law, and avoid illegal / geopolitical lines. If you're an American company hosting stuff in Russia, you can bet the GRU/SVR would be very happy to abuse it. If you're running a torrent site in Ukraine, you can bet the US would be very happy to claim extraterritorial magic jurisdiction and get you extradited from Poland.

As a French company, you're already beholden to French law and French legal decisions. "Data is hosted in Hong Kong" doesn't matter in the slightest, it only exposes you to more risk.

soco 9 hours ago|||
Mistral is still hosted on US providers, their EU centers are only in planning. Data access aside, if AWS or Azure (or Cloudflare) are ordered to pull the plug, it's still goodbye Mistral. Unless you use a third party hoster that is, or do it yourself of course - already possible.
amonith 9 hours ago||
To extend on that a little bit: they use data centers located in EU, but owned by US cloud providers. They can still pull the plug ofc, so it's only a small difference, but still
erispoe 8 hours ago|||
Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.
lelanthran 8 hours ago||
> Except the evidence today rather points to SOTA model + harness than fine tuned models.

I have not seen that, actually. I still see most companies who want to jump into AI for the business sort of try RAG, but more often they just buy Chat accounts for their users.

The only place that harnesses appear to be used is in software development, but most companies aren't doing that either.

srivmo 13 hours ago|||
> 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?

wodenokoto 10 hours ago|||
ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond. Within those, agents can have sub agents (like when it does research).

When generating images most services will have a small agent that rewrites your request and hands it off to the generative image model.

So from the treasure trove point of view, optimized agents have their place. From companies building pipelines, they also have their place.

TeMPOraL 10 hours ago||
> ChatGPT is already a small agent that receives your message and decides which agent needs to respond.

Right, but this was done to value-optimize the product, i.e. try to always give you the shittiest (cheapest) model you can bear, because otherwise people would always choose the smartest (most expensive) model for any query.

Taking away the model choice from the user introduces a lot of ways to cut down costs, but one thing it does not do is make the product give users better/more reliable answers.

lelanthran 12 hours ago|||
> 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?

Think of it as a base model (the megalith) which then has the weights adjusted towards a specific use-case (SAP, for example).

Bombthecat 4 hours ago|||
The companies I work want onprem models, and no Chinese ones. Does mistral support onprem? ( For a price)
Stromgren 12 hours ago|||
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.
isodev 13 hours ago|||
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.
haraldooo 14 hours ago|||
I agree. Just started using it. Can you give some examples of fields you maybe even prefer Mistral?
Forgeties79 6 hours ago|||
I use a pretty lightweight local Mistral model in LM studio for both creative and technical writing/iterating and it’s fantastic.
spiderfarmer 12 hours ago|||
Yes, since it's not American, it will be the de-facto choice for most big European companies.
jstummbillig 12 hours ago||
Why would that be? Most big EU companies use ms teams or google workspace, for example.
schubidubiduba 12 hours ago||
They use those because the decision to use them was made years ago. Things have changed since then
utopiah 12 hours ago|||
I want to believe... but I also need proofs of that "trend", any reference I could read on please?
AdamN 12 hours ago|||
It's definitely a topic of conversation in Reddit, etc... However I agree that the push to reduce US dependence by EU companies (and countries) is hampered by the fact that US stuff is already embedded (Microsoft but also Google, etc...) and that many of these companies are transnational anyway (very few European companies are solely inside the EU) and finally and most importantly just about every company will choose the option that does the job best for the right price (sovereignty is a distant second for most decision makers).
hermanzegerman 7 hours ago||||
Multiple Government organisations ditching Microsoft? Including entire German states?

My University also migrated to OpenExchange

utopiah 4 hours ago||
That's the public sector. I can also give examples of schools in Denmark, cities in France, education system in France, cities in Spain too, but they said "big EU companies".
spiderfarmer 11 hours ago|||
While few companies announce this publicly, I know from personal experience with corporate clients that many companies are preparing for Trump to use Big Tech as a bargaining chip.

And they should. Because the US is not behaving rationally at all.

https://nltimes.nl/2026/02/10/rabobank-ing-abn-amro-seek-eur...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/13/gartner_cio_cloud_sov...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/europe-zoom-...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...

https://sherwood.news/tech/europe-wants-to-break-up-with-us-...

drstewart 10 hours ago||
>While few companies announce this publicly, I know from personal experience with corporate clients

Well I have even more personal experience that contradicts yours, and this isn't true at all. Everyone uses Claude / Gemini / OpenAI. Mistral isn't even on the table.

spiderfarmer 4 hours ago|||
Just a sample: https://mistral.ai/customers

And you can Google for "We use Mistral" to find thousands of usecases by startups and other companies.

input_sh 9 hours ago|||
Come on, compared to Google Workspace / Microsoft's whatever-it's-called-these-days, the cost of switching from one LLM provider to another is pretty much zero.

Having an option at the back of your mind is all it takes right now, until push comes to shove of course.

jstummbillig 6 hours ago||||
I don't think big business is genuinely planning for a world where US tech becomes completely unavailable.
spiderfarmer 4 hours ago|||
2 years ago I would have agreed with you, but after Greenland the vibe is very different. And it's not like the situation is improving.
sofixa 6 hours ago|||
Not entirely, but putting more eggs in that basket would certainly be considered lack of planning. Why increase your risk even further when everyone has seen how volatile things can get quickly?
hk__2 10 hours ago||||
Not at all. We continue taking that decision today.
sunaookami 11 hours ago||||
No they haven't. Every company just buys ChatGPT Enterprise.
drstewart 10 hours ago|||
No they haven't.

Proof: Most big EU companies use Claude or Gemini or OpenAI, not Mistral. That choice was made recently.

Things have changed in the loud echo chambers of the internet, maybe (but not really, since people were saying that EU data sovereignty was happening any time now since 2016).

saulapremium 8 hours ago|||
I consult for various companies and have definitely seen a trend. It's not quite the rupture that some expect but clearly not nothing either. Until very recently, the risk assessment of using US providers was considered very hypothetical. Today it still doesn't feel imminent, but it does feel very real.

Of course, it will be slow and painful and Europeans will need to use their own services for them to grow and mature.

sisve 9 hours ago||||
My _feeling_ is that a lot of EU/European politicians has talked a lot more about the need to be independent from the US after Trump threaten Greenland. At least in the nordic countries. Not only concerning data & privacy, but defence, communications, space etc. All areas. The wheel has started to turn. You will not see it if you look around. But in 10 years time, maybe more, Europe will have stopped depending on the US. And that will hit US hard. We pay a lot of money in services to the US.
Aerroon 8 hours ago||
The politicians can talk, but they needed to set up an environment that would've let a European company have a decent shot at competing with the best AI models. But they didn't. Should've thought of that before being proud of setting up those strict tech regulations.
sofixa 6 hours ago|||
> Proof: Most big EU companies use Claude or Gemini or OpenAI, not Mistral. That choice was made recently.

IS a statement with no supporting facts considered "proof"? Just the public list of Mistral customers (https://mistral.ai/customers) is proof alone that quite a few big EU companies are _not_ in fact using Open AI or Claude or Gemini at the strategic level.

Contrast with Antrhopic's Europe based customers, the majority of which are small companies (only big one I can identify from a skim is L'Oreal): https://claude.com/customers?f80ce999_sort_date=desc&f80ce99...

Or OpenAI's customers, of which the only big European ones I can spot are Scania and Philips: https://openai.com/stories/

Note: I'm talking about strategic enterprise AI deployments for the company or at least a division, not individual developers being allowed to use Claude Code etc. The moat and the money will be in the former, not latter.

umeridrisi 12 hours ago|||
Is this the best Grok alternative?
spiderfarmer 12 hours ago||
Any model is.
grosswait 8 hours ago||
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.

butILoveLife 7 hours ago||
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.

Duwensatzaj 5 hours ago|||
What lies have you seen? ChatGPT is the most censored one, but I’ve only seen rejections, not lies.

My other complaint is that ChatGPT ends every response with a teaser to ask more questions.

butILoveLife 4 hours ago||
Ask game theory questions with real humans where its best to defect.
spiderfarmer 4 hours ago|||
> Grok is nice for asking morally gray questions. ChatGPT will lie in these cases.

Are you really that oblivious to the painfully cringy manipulation tactics by the man who partied at Epstein's island? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

butILoveLife 7 hours ago||
If you couldn't use the words Europe to describe why you'd chose Mistral, you'd have no good reasons to choose Mistral.

Its just not good. Its bottom floor for LLMs.

danelski 5 hours ago||
> Its bottom floor for LLMs.

What? That's just demonstrably false. The market doesn't consist of 5 providers.

butILoveLife 4 hours ago||
You know about LMarena? I just looked it up, Mistral is number 59 on the list.

Free Chinese models are better than it.

danelski 4 hours ago||
That's one of the possible benchmarks, not the only one. Being 59th there, on a list enriched with every variation of Model_Name X.Y (March 2025 Preview) Pro-Thinking, translates to being in the top 10 providers worldwide which is a very interesting mark of failure considering that coincidentally they're also number 1 from their economic area. If you don't know why the last part is important, go read some news.
butILoveLife 1 hour ago||
[dead]
mark_l_watson 20 hours ago||
I am rooting for Mistral with their different approach: not really competing on the largest and advanced models, instead doing custom engineering for customers and generally serving the needs of EU customers.
ChrisGreenHeur 14 hours ago||
I found it to be the best model if you want to talk about topics philosophical. It has no problems going deep and technical while other models tend to be afraid of overshooting the comprehension of the reader.
jerrygoyal 17 hours ago|||
their ocr model is goated
SyneRyder 12 hours ago|||
Did they make significant improvements in OCR 3? The quality I was getting from Mistral OCR 2 was nowhere near as good as what I could get from just sending the same files to Claude Sonnet via an API call.

I have been finding Voxtral useful though.

stavros 16 hours ago||||
Better than Qwen? I guess the best overall is Gemini, right?
ph4rsikal 15 hours ago|||
Gemini? Not anywhere near.
thefounder 15 hours ago|||
Gemini is the worst
stavros 10 hours ago||
Really? This article was gushing about it:

https://generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-solves-han...

Which one's the best?

oakpond 12 hours ago||||
probably yes. considering that even some of their non-ocr models can recognize my shitty handwritten math
arushs 16 hours ago|||
[dead]
nicman23 14 hours ago|||
also offering support for local deployments
w4yai 18 hours ago|||
Go Mistral !
doctorpangloss 15 hours ago||
first, there was .ai

next, it sounds like it's going to be .eu

but what about ai.eu

fnord123 9 hours ago||
> but what about ai.eu

oh, .. why?

upghost 17 hours ago||
> Pre-training allows organizations to build domain-aware models by learning from large internal datasets.

> Post-training methods allow teams to refine model behavior for specific tasks and environments.

How do you suppose this works? They say "pretraining" but I'm certain that the amount of clean data available in proper dataset format is not nearly enough to make a "foundation model". Do you suppose what they are calling "pretraining" is actually SFT and then "post-training" is ... more SFT?

There's no way they mean "start from scratch". Maybe they do something like generate a heckin bunch of synthetic data seeded from company data using one of their SOA models -- which is basically equivalent to low resolution distillation, I would imagine. Hmm.

qntty 8 hours ago||
Pre-training mean exposing an already-trained model to more raw text like PDF extracts etc (aka continued pre-training). You wouldn't be starting from scratch, but it's still pre-training because the objective is just next token prediction of the text you expose it to.

Post-training means everything else: SFT, DPO, RL, etc. Anything that involves things like prompt/response pairs, reward models, or benefits from human feedback of any kind.

losvedir 8 hours ago||
Er, then what is the "already trained" model? I thought pre-training was the gradient descent through the internet part of building foundational models.
mirekrusin 15 hours ago|||
Probably marketing speak for full fine-tuning vs PEFT/LoRA.
lelanthran 12 hours ago|||
I would guess:

Pre-training: refining the weights in an existing model using more training data.

Post-training: Adding some training data to the prompt (RAG, basically).

anon373839 16 hours ago|||
I think they are referring to “continued pretraining”.
stingraycharles 16 hours ago|||
I can imagine that, as usual, you start with a few examples and then instruct an LLM to synthesize more examples out of that, and train using that. Sounds horrible, but actually works fairly well in practice.
gunalx 13 hours ago||
Probably just means SFT fine-tuning a base model, vs behavioural dpo and/or SFT fine-tuning a instruction model.
jcmartinezdev 10 hours ago||
Mistral is doing some really great stuff lately. Sure, it's hard to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic and their models, but they are taking up some interesting takes and designing their product in unique ways.

I like a lot what they are doing and I'll be watching them a lot more closely. I'd love to work for them btw!

roxolotl 20 hours ago||
Mistral has been releasing some cool stuff. Definitively behind on frontier models but they are working a different angle. Was just talking at work about how hard model training is for a small company so we’d probably never do it. But with tools like this, and the new unsloth release, training feels more in reach.
ryeguy_24 18 hours ago||
How many proprietary use cases truly need pre-training or even fine-tuning as opposed to RAG approach? And at what point does it make sense to pre-train/fine tune? Curious.
troyvit 4 hours ago||
I'm thinking stuff like this:

https://denverite.com/2026/03/12/ai-recycling-facility-comme...

You could take a model like the one referenced in the article, retool it with Forge for oh I don't know, compost, and use it to flag batches that contain too much paper for instance.

These kinds of applications would work across industries, basically anywhere where you have a documented process and can stand to have automated oversight.

mirekrusin 15 hours ago|||
You can fine tune small, very fast and cheap to run specialized models ie. to react to logs, tool use and domain knowledge, possibly removing network llm comms altogether etc.
Shitty-kitty 16 hours ago|||
rag basically gives the llm a bunch of documents to search thru for the answer. What it doesn't do is make the algorithm any better. pre-training and fine-tunning improve the llm abaility to reason about your task.
baby 18 hours ago||
RAG is dead
charcircuit 18 hours ago|||
Using tools and skills to retrieve data or files is anything but dead.
nathanappere 12 hours ago||
I think people just mean "using vector databases to enable RAG".
menaerus 11 hours ago||
Even that doesn't make sense. Why would you not build a vector database to complement your RAG engine?
charcircuit 11 hours ago||
For coding use cases you may want a way to search for symbols themselves or do a plain text exact match for the name of a symbol to find the relevant documents to include. There is more to searching than building a basic similarity search.
menaerus 10 hours ago||
Sorry but who mentioned coding as a use-case? My comment was general and not specific to the coding use-case, and I don't understand where did you get the idea from that I am arguing that building a similarity search engine would be a substitute to the symbol-search engine or that symbol-search is inferior to the similarity-search? Please don't put words into my mouth. My question was genuine without making any presumptions.

Even with the coding use-case you would still likely want to build a similarity search engine because searching through plain symbols isn't enough to build a contextual understanding of higher-level concepts in the code.

charcircuit 4 hours ago||
I mentioned coding as a use case in my comment you replied to. You were asking for an example for when one wouldn't use vector search and I provided one. I did not say similarity search would be a substitute. I said that for the coding case you do not need it.

>you would still likely want to build a similarity search engine

In practice tools like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Kimi Code, etc are getting away with searching for code with grep / find and understanding code by loading a sufficient amount of code into the context window. It is sufficient to understand higher level concepts in the code. The extra complexity of maintaining vector database top of this is not free and requires extra complexity.

CharlesW 18 hours ago||||
And yet your blog says you think NFTs are alive. Curious.

But seriously, RAG/retrieval is thriving. It'll be part of the mix alongside long context, reranking, and tool-based context assembly for the forseeable future.

WesleyJohnson 1 hour ago|||
The issue I had with RAG when I tried building our own internal chat/knowledge bot was pulling in the relevant knowledge before sending to the LLM. Domain questions like "What is Cat Block B?" are common and, for a human, provide all the context that is needed for someone to answer within our org. But vectorizing that and then finding matching knowledge produced so many false positives. I tried to circumvent that by adding custom weighting based on keywords, source (Confluence, Teams, Email), but it just seemed unreliable. This was probably a year ago and, admittedly, I was diving in head first without truly understanding RAG end to end.

Being able to just train a model on all of our domain knowledge would, I imagine, produce much better results.

nl 16 hours ago||||
I don't think RAG is dead, and I don't think NFTs have any use and think that they are completely dead.

But the OP's blog is more about ZK than about NFTs, and crypto is the only place funding work on ZK. It's kind of a devil's bargain, but I've taken crypto money to work on privacy preserving tech before and would again.

prophesi 12 hours ago||||
Not OP, but...

> Of course you would have to set a temperature of 0 to prevent abuse from the operator, and also assume that an operator has access to the pre-prompt

Doesn't the fact that LLM's are still non-deterministic with a 0 temperature render all of this moot? And why was I compelled to read a random blog post on the unsolved issue of validating natural language? It's a SQL injection except without a predetermined syntax to validate against, and thus a NP problem we've yet to solve.

elicash 17 hours ago||||
I have no interest in anything crypto, but they are making a proposal about NFTs tied to AI (LLMs and verifiable machine learning) so they can make ownership decisions.

So it'd be alive in the making decisions sense, not in a "the technology is thriving" sense.

strongly-typed 18 hours ago|||
Wait, what does NFTs have to do with RAG?
panarky 18 hours ago|||
I, for one, find NFT-shilling to be a strong signal that I should downgrade my trust in everything else a person says.
LoganDark 18 hours ago|||
Nothing, I think they're just pointing out a seeming lack of awareness of what really is or isn't dead.
loeg 18 hours ago||||
Is it??
bigyabai 18 hours ago|||
In what, X's hype circles? Embeddings are used in production constantly.
dmix 19 hours ago||
This is definitely the smart path for making $$ in AI. I noticed MongoDB is also going into this market with https://www.voyageai.com/ targeting business RAG applications and offering consulting for company-specific models.
dash2 13 hours ago||
I think it’s interesting what this approach suggests about who will profit from AI. I’m sceptical that having huge numbers of GPUs is a moat. After all, real humans – even geniuses – are trained on much much less data than the whole Internet. But proprietary and specialised data could very well be a moat. It’s hard to train a scientist/lawyer/analyst without reading a lot of science/law/finance. Companies’ proprietary data might encode a great deal of irreplaceable knowledge. Seems as if Mistral is taking this bet.
copirate 10 hours ago||
> After all, real humans – even geniuses – are trained on much much less data than the whole Internet.

It's certainly different data, but one could argue that real humans have been trained on 3.5 billion years of evolution data.

rigorclaw 6 hours ago||
[dead]
csunoser 20 hours ago|
Huh. I initially thought this is just another finetuning end point. But apparently they are partnering up with customers on the pretraining side as well. But RL as well? Jeez RL env are really hard to get right. Best wishes I guess.
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