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It's gonna be interesting to see the final version, since this is a preview model still. I'm not completely sure as to how this works, but from what I gathered it will be further trained during this period, so it might improve a bit.

Since cost is so much higher than deepseek though it really seems like the biggest reason to use it would be "in the mistral subscription" for personal use or "because you need to abide by european data privacy laws" for companies.

Mostly I'm happy they're still in competition, as I mentioned already elsewhere.

I'm still waiting for a model that can do sheet music transcription for < $0.10 per page.

Shouldn't be that difficult as there are huge datasets. But somehow, the AI labs cannot do it.

I was confused and thought it's a new model... but no, it's the same. What's the purpose of reposting this as a new story? Am I missing something?

Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 did the same; they would output random Chinese characters and then say “I made a typo, let me fix it” and it’s just them removing that stay Chinese characters. Haven’t seen this since 5.1 family of models.

Does this suggest Mistral is distilling Deepseek et. al.? Can distillation keep passing through with high fidelity, or is it lossy like copying a VHS tape?

I've seen this quite a bit on bad quants as well. I ran an early and very lossy quant of one of the Gemma3 models, and it loved to just stick Chinese and Korean characters into the text, sometimes without seeming to realize it had mixed languages.

Ha, ha. Just like when Tilly Norwood switched to Chinese while interviewing with Piers Morgan [1].

On a serious note, I remember getting spooked when I saw a bunch of Chinese characters dumped out into some of my server logs (pre-LLM era). When I pasted the Chinese content from my log into google translate, it was just complete nonsense. Later I found a bug that was dumping raw binary data into my log file which interpreted as Chinese characters when viewed in a text editor. Perhaps similar bugs existed in the models.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VOfGcTqqq8

Can you please share: - what specific input you see this issue with? - which interface you used (API, playground, specific sdk version or a wrapper app)? - whether the chinese chars appear in the thinking section or the output?

Thanks.

happened to me with Gemini too, actually. it sometimes just randomly decides to answer in a different language.

Google also does that surprisingly

you can see the same thing with any models

In Vibe CLI app, when you load Mistral Large 4 it swaps out the cat in the header with a larger one

It's a nice little detail

Some details and benchmarks were announced but the weights didn’t get released

Le Chaton Fat is a lovely name. I predict the next Michelin restaurant with will have an LLM as the Chef...

Well, Models are hard to just distill down to a single benchmark number, or even a few across multiple different benchmark - they all behave and work slightly differently and you can find some who work or feel better for you and your use-case specifically.

But you're right, Mistral Large 4 seems a much more expensive but overall weaker model across the board.

The reason to use them would be, well, because they're...Mistral. They're in EU, france is large in nuclear energy so the energy cost of training has much less of an environmental impact, the data protection laws are very good in EU. This can really be a deciding factor for many EU companies, and I think it's good that they now have something which is at least semi-usable. (apparently)

It's also good that other options exist, even if they are worse. Deepseek is kind of like a large specter looming over every model release, because it's just SO cheap and good. That doesn't mean we should abandon every other model.

Still, the model is not really competitive on price and abilities alone. I'm mostly happy to see Mistral still in the fight.

If you're required to use a European model

Maybe not now, but in a few years, we might not need frontier models anymore. Open-weight models are only half a year behind the frontier, and both categories are advancing really fast.

Gemini 2.0 Flash, released just 1.5 years ago, could not even repeat a few paragraphs unchanged. Now, we have Mistral, DeepSeek, and MiMo.

if you care about data-retention policy or you have to use european models ...

Patriotism.

qwen-3.8-flash-next is suprisingly good, I find it overthinks, but it's quite usable.

NVM. Looks like it already exists:

https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...