Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation (mistral.ai)
97 points by riadsila 4 hours ago
fastball an hour ago
Should've called it Safestral.
Also I do like Mistral's seemingly newer strategy of focusing on smaller, more fine-tuned models for various use-cases, presumably the result of their large MoE models not competing effectively with the frontier models.
himata4113 18 minutes ago
It's not that their strategy is to train smaller models, it's the only choice they have. Training SOTA takes anywhere from 1.5b to 150b. We don't know the real cost of training for the chinese models, but mistral neither has the compute nor money to do that.
hypfer an hour ago
I would be curious if this can do moderation with an arbitrary ruleset, or if it's just "that one moderation style" we already know from current big tech platforms.
The kind where malicious intent is okay if the words are nice.
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Or, rephrased: How big is the space in which you can tune this model without retraining.
Is it just "we hate sex"/"we don't hate sex" "We hate violence"/"we don't hate violence" or is it _truly_ as flexible as claimed?
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Maybe something like "Is this guy a corporate fraud that is going to waste my time with performative nonsense?"
That would be the true test for a moderation model and I would be immensely impressed if it could manage to pull that off.
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Edit: Looking at the paper though.. probably not.
I suppose this is useful for B2B, which seems to be mistrals whole thing. Question is just if it is also useful for society to hand the SV prefab morals down like that. Kinda like cultural imperialism but with an ethical spin.
Maybe opinions on those base datasets could occasionally differ more than the model can be steered.
mosura an hour ago
Someone should use this to do the exact opposite of the intention: filter for “offensive” content, and boost it or collate it into a newsletter/email blast for people of culture.
You have to give it to Mistral they do at least know what the market near them says they want right now. The great problem is in a few years of this that market won’t be worth anything.
Edit to add, you could also add this to an AI workflow so as to produce content that walks right up to the line but doesn’t trigger it.
mcintyre1994 2 minutes ago
> filter for “offensive” content, and boost it or collate it into a newsletter/email blast for people of culture.
I think that's the main service that xAI provide for X.
petcat an hour ago
> they do at least know what the market near them says they want right now
It does seem to be a very European approach to AI that their flagship AI lab is just making models that do nothing other than monitor and moderate internet content.
I guess they know that the EU AI Act, Chat Control, etc are going to cause a lot of companies to need this kind of compliance.
cinntaile 3 minutes ago
[delayed]
lava_pidgeon an hour ago
Some of the best social media is heavily moderate. This includes HN and r/credible defense . With a Quiet transparent and cheap LLM I imagine a social media website where you can have good discussion about everything around the world it would be a game changer and on my to-do list.
petcat an hour ago
nezhar 2 hours ago
lenerdenator 2 hours ago
I'd really like to see more conversation around Mistral's models. It's good to see Europe developing AI.
BlackRabbit1 an hour ago
The problem is that their performance is too far away from the latest generation of Asian models.
They had kept up in the mid-range a few years ago. But this standing is sadly long gone.
If you need a fast Opensource'ed LLMs you can go for EU-hosted DeepSeek or Qwen.
yborg an hour ago
By this logic the Chinese should have just given up and let the American AI companies have the market because they were so far behind. I'm sure Europe has the capability to distill other people's frontier models to catch up if they wish to do so.
baq 28 minutes ago
elianaive 28 minutes ago
I'm a bit doubtful that a black box approach like this to moderation will ever catch on.
petcat an hour ago
Mistral needs to abandon their Everything-stral branding. Getting kind of lame.
"Shieldstral" is an awkward and bad name
braiamp an hour ago
That naming only works if you commit to the bit even when it doesn't make sense. That builds branding.
cyanregiment an hour ago
Was this one the last stral for you?
The stral the broke the camel's back?
whythismatters 20 minutes ago
The shortest stral has been pulled for you
vardalab 23 minutes ago
Says who? I kind of like it.
simlevesque an hour ago
People complain when a product use a familiar name that might collide and there's also people complaining when they invent new words altogether.
Naming things is hard.
ranger_danger 12 minutes ago
There can be other valid perspectives than your own