MCP vs CLI is the same discussion as between a GUI app and a web app: it's all about the distribution. There is approximately no difference in functionality except whether you're hitting a dedicated service or running a local tool which connects to a dedicated service.
With saas is turned out that distribution to a browser solves a pretty major pain point and I expect MCPs to be treated the same. Can you trivially replace an MCP server with a CLI tool which accepts a token? Yes - but why do that to yourself when you can hit the endpoint directly?
The EU has intentional structural hurdles to pouring money into a predetermined single company. Both hurdles meant to fight corruption and nepotism, and hurdles meant to ensure fairness between the member states. After all, money to Mistral is money to France too, and you don't want countries to abuse such mechanisms
It's not impossible, but China is just much better set up for the nessesary level of government support
China has cheap coal powered electricity and leaders that make things happen. Europe has beaureaucrats that only love talking, high taxes and expensive energy.
I've never heard or read anything about the EU planning on investing money in Mistral. They're a private company. They're French. It honestly sounds kind of absurd.
No, we want you to backup your claims and provide sources or stop adding pointless low effort anti-EU noise to the conversation. It's frustrating, any time there's any kind of discussion about anything European on HN it gets flooded with shallow, low effort "EU-bad" posts like your contributions here.
If you're going to make that claim at least put some effort in.
This is a mostly American forum and some people want to piss on the EU to elevate themselves. Europeans do the same to the US but about politics, health care, work life balance, and quality of life. You know, the stuff that matters :D
agreed, the next price increase from frontier labs (and the inevitable limits decrease in subscription tiers) will have people thinking real hard about their model providers and that's when mistral should be ready. however, given their recent performance, I realistically don't have my hopes high up.
Not in many tasks. I use deepseek as a fallback in https://phrasing.app and it’s always very apparent when it happen (due to mistakes/clear performance drop off)
I feel like there's an implication here that distillation is a problem but I don't understand what you mean. I thought distillation was generating text from a model and then training another model on it. Is the something unethical in that? You're paying the API costs to generate the tokens, right?
Or I guess more to the point: is this something frontier labs have said is (or tried to paint at any rate) problematic? This feels like an "out of the loop" situation because I've only ever heard "distillation" with a positive connotation before.
That OpenAI was in the wrong when they ignored everyone copyright, does not make it right to ignore their ToU. If a one wants IP and rule of law (incl contracts) to be respected, one should not violate others rights when it is convenient.
On a more risk-strategy level there is the size of their legal team, general endowment, and supplier and political connections to consider.
Everyone is free to ignore their ToU, but I can understand why a company would avoid it...
it doesn't matter the reason. This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.
Mistral looks like it's fading away to irrelevance unless they can play alongside the similar sized models, or have some unique advantage other than being in Europe, for Europe. I was really excited for them back when they were startup that had the biggest European venture round ever. This space will have a few winners, and many losers. Google, plus either Anthropic or OpenAI most likely. Big models will see breakthroughs in inference performance/cost fall precipitously and small models will only exist on devices (Pixels and iPhones, cars, watches, bluetooth speakers, etc)
It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I am just pointing out why it’s hard to catch up to scaling laws given the European economic (capital) and political (US would be upset if they found out Europeans distill) constraints. China is only bound by economic constraints.
> This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.
For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably.
For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that.
And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.
So then the European ones should join with European copyright holders to sue OpenAI/Anthropic and watch them trying to BS their way around what they train on.
It’s really a pity, why can’t they feel superior while breaking ToS and copyrights just like Americans can feel superior over Deepseek while breaking ToS and copyrights?
I tried it out on some dev tasks with their Mistral Vibe subscription, and the performance was pretty okay (okay, not great), both in regards to development and speed. Worse than Anthropic's models I'm used to but at 20 EUR per month it wasn't a bad deal - except that the 200k context size would more or less be a deal breaker in many cases.
The other comment already mentioned that you get their subscription: https://mistral.ai/pricing/ they do say that you can try out their coding agent for free, but personally the Pro tier is pretty affordable too to try out for a month.
Then you can install their coding harness, I personally used the Python + uv option: https://mistral.ai/products/vibe/code/ if you don't have uv yet, you might have to install it too: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ though I already use it for other projects. Oh and if on Windows, you probably want to do all of the installation inside of WSL, just so that file paths are the *nix variety, I've had issues otherwise with pretty much every coding harness, like OpenCode as well (across multiple models).
After that, you need an API key for your subscription, you can generate and copy it here: https://console.mistral.ai/codestral/cli that's also where you see the quota, though it seems to NOT refresh instantly, but more or less a few times a day.
The title should read 'it's hard to justify buying any other laptop than the Neo in the sub $1000 space'. It's an absolute unit of a computer; the only more revolutionary box would be the M1 Air (or the original Air. maybe. my vote is on the M1.)
With the software supply chain running amok recently having anything connected feels like playing Russian roulette and I say this as somebody who is running home assistant for years. I’m particularly paranoid about connecting my ev (non-vw) to it now, feels like a serious footgun today, would’ve been convenient three months ago, true.
- Test commences prematurely when people are still around
- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back
- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are
These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.
No one should ever be that close, but it's a worst case scenario within the realm of possibility (people do get themselves into danger sometimes, for example by wandering onto a railroad track when there's a train approaching). I don't think it's unreasonable to reserve the 10 on the 1-10 scale for 'loss of human life'.
I mean, there was that one static fire recently where the rocket broken loose and started flying. This was not for from a populated area. Ok, maybe that was pretty criminally negligent.
SpaceX had a very similar failure during a static fire test in 2016 that destroyed the rocket, payload, and a few key parts of SLC-40 that took them over a year to repair and return to service (September 2016 -> December 2017). The concrete flume trenches were literally melted.
That was a full size rocket on a real mission with the $200M payload on board during the static fire, which is ostensibly worse. The payload was not integrated yet in Blue Origin’s case.
None of this matters in the product: it either is capable of agentic loop workflows or it isn’t. A 10% improvement in probability of single task success makes or breaks the use case.
With saas is turned out that distribution to a browser solves a pretty major pain point and I expect MCPs to be treated the same. Can you trivially replace an MCP server with a CLI tool which accepts a token? Yes - but why do that to yourself when you can hit the endpoint directly?
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