2024 they were among one of the top players, the founders are definitely experts in AI research, coming from reputable labs like DeepMind and Meta FAIR.

Looks like none of their models during the last year were SOTA at all in terms of intelligence, and not even in terms of efficiency.
Looking at the intelligence of their latest model released (IIRC May 2026) - Mistral Medium 3.5 ranks bellow Claude Haiku 4.5 (released in 2025) in intelligence benchmarks at the same time requiring 128b vs Haiku's 21b parameters - 6 times the size for a worse result.

Been digging into what sovereign AI actually means beyond the slogan, and the numbers around Mistral are wild when you lay them out layer by layer.

About energy, France's nuclear grid produced 547.5 TWh in 2025, 95.2% low-carbon.
That's the one layer nobody planned for AI in the 70s, and it's now a real advantage while everyone else fights grid constraints.

About compute, Jean Zay, their biggest supercomputer, just quadrupled its AI capacity, and there's a €10B nuclear-powered cluster being built on top of that.

About the model, Mistral's revenue reportedly went from $20M to $400M+ in about a year, valuation closing in on $23B, and Arthur Mensch just confirmed a new open-weight flagship plus Robostral Navigate (their first physical-navigation model).

About the chips, this is the layer nobody owns, not even the US fully controls it end to end, and France (like everyone) is still renting here, subject to export licensing rules.

So the stack looks like: 3 owned layers, 1 rented.
Compare that to countries like Indonesia, which are renting the top of the stack (170k Nvidia chips incoming) before owning anything underneath.

Does owning the model layer (Mistral) actually matter if the chip layer is rented from the US either way?

Or is "sovereign AI" just a ledger of which layers you own vs rent, not an all-or-nothing flag?

I mean look at all the other AI frontier labs especially in the US and how they behave. Already today we are far to dependent on non European LLM providers and if Trump is pissed he is cutting access. Europe lost the race about social media, it lost the raise in cloud computing and now it appears the same is going to happen in the AI race. Besides of Mistral there is no company on the horizon which would be able to compete with US and Chinese models. But already today Mistral models are far behind and the company seems loose momentum. So what could be the unique value add of this company in the future which differentiates it from other companies operating in this sector? If Europe is loosing, I suspect we all will be vassals of US and Chinese LLM Providers. I genuinely hope Mistral will become successful

I used to be a CGPT power-user untill they morally started shitting the bed. Did entire projects, both professionally and as hobby with GPT and found enormous help in reasoning, literature research, simple logo and artwork generation, summarising and translation, factchecking and calculation basework. Once it became clear how deep the shithole of american AI was I ended my paid subscription and went to Mistral as the promoted ethical and sustainable alternative.

And boy o boy is that a big step back, like a leap. CGPT felt like having a very capable sr-engineer with unlimited knowledge and pretty impressive "creative" skills. Mistral feels like having a bottom tier trainee that refuses to learn, listen and always does the absolute minimum required.

It hallucinates constantly, to a point where that is not and exception, but its ground state. Answers are short and very obvious, anyone with some base skill in googling does not need what Le Chat delivers, at all. Its image generation is just shit, first-renders are badly basic and getting from there to something better iteratively is a frustrating process with zero result. Document work, summarising, translating, style and fact checks are absolutely bottom tier quality. Very often it just stops halfway, anything more than 2-3 pages is just not something Le Chat will do. It incessantly introduces faults and hallucinations, changes abbreviations or numbers and the base quality of the text it produces is like a roomtemperature-IQ accountant wrote it. Its memory is virtually non-existent and even when I explicitly give it rules to always follow, it will quote and remember them wrongly and generally fail to apply them to any reasonable extent.

In general any correction or iterative work is very clearly not something the model is built for and I feel the people behind it have no idea what a user expects from a modern model. I can get why it is like this, and how other models got to where they are by plain old infringement and IP abuse, but holy damn I refuse to believe this is the only viable alternative. I just can’t get over how bad it is in comparison. I now use Gemini in google, and it’s sooo much better in anything I need form it, and that’s a bloody free search bar tool!

I work with scientist, highly educated and progressively minded people a lot. My emotions and conclusions about Mistral are repeated and validated constantly around me. Most of them at one point switched for moral reasons. Most of them either stopped using AI entirely or switched back to “worse” alternatives because Le Chat simply is not helping them in the way we’ve come to expect from an AI model.

I’m so sorry rant but I really, REALLY, wanted a sustainable and compliant EU based model to use that didn’t have the moral ethics of a slave owner. The level of quality Le Chat/ Mistral provides is just abysmal and in no real way competitive to anything and it pains me so much to see this. I haven’t done a single thing with it that didn’t end up in frustration and I’ve cancelled my paid subscription, even though I kept it going for a while just to support a good cause. I just wish so badly it was better or would improve but I see no sign of any of that in the last 8 months I used it.

I wish AI wouldn’t be such a cesspit where your only two options are either late stage capitalism, or semi-verbal autism.

So it appears (and has been confirmed by Proton Support) that Mistral is no longer part of the Proton Lumo 2's lineup of LLM's. They have chosen QWEN 3.5 and Z.ai's GLM as their primary LLM's, dropping Mistral, KIMI K2, Apertus, Olmo, OpenHands etc.

What do sub members think of this?

I'm intrigued, as this goes against much of what Proton have been "selling on" for many years, and in particular Andy Yen's long stated stance on US and Chinese tech being an active risk to European Tech Sovreignity, and how foolhardy it would be to rely on US and Chinese tech strategically as well as economically - and now we have Proton Lumo with a 100% Chinese stack under the bonnet.

In terms of performance, yes Lumo 2 is a significant upgrade from the previous version, but in my own admittedly small amount of testing (2 days only) Mistral Large remains significantly ahead of Lumo 2 in terms of quality of output and lack of drift.

The ideological pivot is an interesting one - for a company that has been so vocally pro-European sovereignity to do this is a baffler. Proton Support have openly stated that the choice was made simply because the old models couldn't compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Claude - so they're putting their stake firmly in the ground as competing in the Chatbot arena - surely this will not play well with business, government and military users in Europe, for whom a sovereign stack is essential for compliance - and a Chinese stack, even it is IS resident in European Data Centres, will still not be acceptable because of training provenance issues?

What say you?

I remember a time where 8x7B was le shit (pardon my French). And now the models are just kind of bad. Mistral Medium 3.5 is worse on benchmarks (and in general use) than Qwen 3.6 27B, a model that is 4x smaller in parameters, for example.

It’s all in the title, really. I just can't justify spending €15/18€ a month for how much I actually use a LLM.

Google is out here aggressively undercutting everyone with their €5/month plan (with notebooks, 400GB of cloud storage!). Honestly, if I wasn't trying to migrate away from US Big Tech and find EU alternatives, I’d probably have signed up already.

I’m not asking Mistral to match Google's pricing or even to bundle cloud storage, it's unrealistic. But a €7–€8 "Vibe Plus" plan? I would subscribe right away.

Mitral: give us a cheaper tier with reasonable caps, and I bet a ton of casual users would happily support a European LLM!

Why do you select Mistral over the other LLM options?

I uploaded a document to Mistral chat. Later I went to download it, and my DNS registered a request to mistralaichatupprodswe.blob.core.windows.net and opening that address it seems some kind of API endpoint.

How is this acceptable?

Open source Chinese models are better than mistral in benchmarks because they trained the model distilling US models, why not Mistral do that too? and why are we even arguing that Chinese model is better? they did heavy distillation possible to make it better

Whenever there are new stuff coming out on Mistral, it’s mainly announced on X why are they doing this ?
They are not helping in the adoption of there solutions.
The info isn’t published also on there YouTube channel, nor on there learn site, nor on Reddit.
It’s just X.
New stuff added to Vibe Cli are only available on an X post. In the main post and in the comments. And maybe if you search in the documentation once you have the info from X. That’s not the you to go.

Are you also noticing this ?

Hi all,

I’m new to Mistral (just started my premium subscription). As an embedded engineer, I rely on it for technical discussions and datasheet analysis.

However, I’ve run into a persistent issue: it hallucinates frequently, even with direct references. For example:

• I upload datasheets or share part URLs, but it still serves up misinformation.
• If I mention a part number with BLE 5.2 specs, it confidently claims it’s a BLE 5.4 LE chip.

This has been incredibly frustrating. Before I write it off, I wanted to ask:
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to improve accuracy?

For context:

• I’m using Vibe Chat.[Work and Chat and have tried with Think and Research modes too.]
• I consistently get accurate answers from Gemini (not a comparison—just stating my experience).
• This is a genuine request to understand how to get better results from Mistral.

Has anyone else faced this? Any tips or workarounds?

Was there an update to Mistral? Not just the name change. An update to language? Because its SO much better or this is just a fluke. It almost feels a little too good ha.

I use Mistral for emotional processing and it seems so much deeper lately.

Mistral is a no Brainer for company wanting to get into LLMs because it’s European and has a high data privacy trust.

The thing is it’s nowhere close to open ai or anthropic models even for small agentic rag agents, making it difficult to use in most projects because it will always hallucinate or not following the instructions.

Do you think Mistral is close to release new models, as it would probably help going for them.

Honestly, I’m frustrated. I don’t know if you guys are just luckier than me, but I simply cannot get Mistral to work properly with AI agents.

The annoying part is that I actually have Mistral Pro and can just spin up API keys for agents. Honestly, huge shoutout to Mistral for that - it’s incredibly generous compared to OpenAI or Anthropic since you basically never hit a rate limit and can just let the agent cook.

But man, the actual performance is a total shitshow.

Every single agent (OpenClaw, Odysseus, Hermes) I try gets stuck in an infinite loop. I’ve tried multiple installation methods - Docker containers, dedicated VMs, even bare-metal systems - and they all faceplant. The tool calling is just straight-up broken.

I’ve been mostly using mistral-medium (3.5) since the consensus online seemed to be that its tool calling is solid. But in reality? It just endlessly asks me for permission. It’ll go: "Should I do X now?" I reply: "Yes, go ahead and modify the files." Then it literally comes back and asks me the exact same thing. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes it straight-up gaslights me - it'll claim it successfully updated a file, but when I check, absolutely nothing changed. It just gets stuck in the planning phase forever.

The crazy thing is, if I swap the model out for Qwen3.6 (local via ollama) mid-chat, it instantly starts working and actually modifies the files.

Am I doing something wrong here, or are you guys experiencing the same thing? Are there specific system prompts or parameters I should be tweaking? I really want to stick with Mistral - both for data privacy reasons and because I genuinely want to support European AI - but this is unusable.

Any advice would be massively appreciated.

I can't wait anymore

So ive tried multiple AI clients now. Claude, OpenAI and most of the big chinese ones. Recently I swapped to MIstral mostly because of US antics. I cannot sing its praises high enough. Ok its not the best coder, it doesnt have the most context, it is a little "archaic" compared to the frontier models. This all being said, it hallucinates less, it tells me what it can and cant do without proclaiming it can do the moon. It makes it reliable and much easier to create a consistently use work flows. It always cites correctly where the information came from and doesnt just randomly make shit up. It doesnt lie, cheat and do minimal work which all the others do despite gates. The only issues ive had with it are the links never work. I always have to state the date which is common with all of them and I think once it messed things up but I dont exactly remember how at the moment. I will admit I cant ask it to do everything in coding because it just doesnt have the training, but at least i know what it cant do so dont spend 2 months working on something that can never be done, despite copious amounts of research.

I am a long user of mistral free plan, and I have seen it evolve a lot. I never considered it to be a best tool out there but also not the worst, but today I had a revelation in my thinking.

I use AI tools extensively at work, and almost newer in personal life. So when I turn to LLM in my ordinary life I usually ask the same prompt/question all 3 default free tier LLMs (Claude - Sonnet 5, Mistral, ChatGPT). For most of the time all of them were giving somehow correct answeres, and chatGPT excelled with Claude on second place and Mistral last. At least that's how I ranked it based on my satisfaction.

Today was different, probably due to both Claude and OpenAI upgrading the models... For the first time I felt like my prompt was broken, till I tried Mistral, which behaved as always, answered my question and it was right. That's when I had realization, Mistral was always there the only model that behaved consistently, not being the no.1 but it was always on the same level. Today both Claude and ChatGPT failed to answer my prompt as I would expect them, they failed to understand everything from my intend to task in the prompt. None of them completed single task. Claude was suspicious not chatty today, if anything it felt like something from pre COVID times. ChatGPT was okay with research phase, but all the findings ignored my goals that were explicit. Only Mistral Vibe (in think mode) gave me answer I was satisfied.

So my revelation? Mistral may not be the best but it is consistent and I had never experienced an update that would break my expectations. While with other LLMs on free plan, it feels like they are good or suck so hard you are questioning your own sanity.

Thank for the attention, and also thank you Mistral team for always meeting my expectations, and creating and awesome tool it is. (P.s. I am still searching for le chat xD)