Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.

[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.

Open models we have now will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.

I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.

Put a JEV on the output to filter out responses that might show its Mistral

Theft is the AI way

Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?

HashiCorp has the same business model for their products: you are free to use them even in a business, except if your business is a competitor of their own cloud solutions.

https://commonsclause.com

I'm tired of people trying to approach every legal/contractual issue as a binary, and treating flexible terminology like the magic words of a spell. They're up front about needing a license to exploit it commercially, but meantime you can use it without restrictions for personal/ experimental/ scientific/ educational/ development purposes, which is a lot. It's not 100% open by your pious definition, but it's clearly much more open than frontier labs who never release weights to the public at all.

If you're running a business, buy a license and be happy. All businesses have expenses, if you're not willing to ever pay for anything you're a freeloader and your business model is probably shit. Complain about whether the license is good value or not if you like. If you're not running a business on top of it, use the model and be happy.

People need to make money.

This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.

It looks extremely clear on this page: https://docs.mistral.ai/models

Inference can be a commoditized business.

I got super angry reactions.

Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.

Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.

Open source never implied that commercial applications were authorized.

I feel like the community is splitting hairs when the Anthropic/OpenAI are just locking everybody in way further than Mistral.

Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc

When it comes to words, popular usage defines (and redefines) the meaning.

permissionless vs permissioned licenses

many of us in open source ascribe to the permissionless ethos, but there is a spectrum or venn

Yeah, serving GLM is a pretty good play on their side. I know they have been criticized for it ("so, you're just reselling GLM...") but it seems practical as in it helps EU companies use it.

I've been using it for my personal project and it's still too expensive and very slow when thinking. I think we need one more generation from mistral and with maybe 50% of this already "slashed" price for this to be competitive (I use Opus 5.5 at work and it's still much better than this).

I wonder if it is serving at a loss to get training feedback (maybe using the margins they get from GLM 5.3 serving which is a slightly smaller model but double the price).

Those in the EU wanting EU-only inference should be aware Mistral put a 10% tax ("upcharge") on Regional Inference[1].

[1] https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/regional-inference

I really don't think it does, the benchmark numbers are dreadful and the cost is higher than Sol. If you have to use an EU model knock yourself out but there are a ton of models that are a lot smarter for a lot less money.

My coding sessions have a >97% input cache rate. DeepSeek got us spoiled. I am not going to use any AI provider with exorbitant or hidden cache rates.

Guardrails on open-weight models is security theater purely to shield whoever released them from a potential PR nightmare.

Much like having a hacking tool doesn't mean you're doing anything illegal, attacking a machine doesn't necessarily mean you're committing a crime. I can hack the living shit out of my local network if I want to.

"Our product won't hack you 96.6% of the time"

In other words, I don't think there's anything misleading happening in the title. When most people discover that certain restrictions exist on using the weights, they will neither be surprised nor disappointed, because the main thing that's being advertised - the weights are available for download - is true!

"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."

Works for me. I can host it, I can run it, I can use it; but if I want to sell access to it as an inference provider, I'd have to get a license.

The economics of open-weight models has always been shaky. It's not an OSI license yes, but metaphorically it's kinda like AGPL.

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...

Very much not open as in open source. It's a shame an organization such as OSI doesn't get out ahead of licensing of weights, what do we call this? "Weights Available" ?

If someone sends me a copy while fully adhering to the license, what right does someone have to tell me what I can do with it? If I buy a book do I not have a right to read it? Lend it to people?

It's probably a good thing libraries already existed pre modern copyright.

4 bit quants can be fine, try it and see.

Please expand on this if you can. Why can't you? Who mandated this?

[0]: https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/intelligence-artifici... "It will run on a laptop": Mistral confirms a lighter Large 4

I pick a model on performance for the job, and from what I've seen, this isn't it.

The price cut makes it more interesting than the preview was, tho.

Mistrals models aren't the best. They certainly are measurably worse when I run them "blank slate". That is: without skills, AGENTS.md, MCPs and so on. But who does that anyway?

Aside from these harnesses, I run many one-off agent threads. They run at most half an hour and fill the context window not even 20% before I stop and "handover". And I tend to be annoyingly demanding and nitpicky in my skills, AGENT.md, prompts and issues (that an agent uses as prompt).

In my workflow, the context is what makes or breaks how well the task is performed almost all of the times. Mistrals models aren't "the best" - some Chinese models are cheaper (with similar outcome), and anthropics' models outperform the output consistently but for 20x or more of the price of Mistral (that is: when using the API/token pricing). But Mistrals models are certainly "good enough". Good enough is good, too.

Do you mean Chinese hosted models?

Because if you're avoiding anything from China, you're going to be sitting in a shack on the side of the road.

Clicked sign in, was presented with a sign up form, got a free account. From there could upgrade to pro plan or pay-as-you-go.

I agree it was perhaps too hidden, but calling it hard is not fair I think.

This is on par with European stereotypes about French engineering so I’ll just go along with it :)

That's because the base offering is free. So you create an account, use it for free, and when you want to pay, click on "Upgrade to Pro."

I've seen some terrible B2B corporate websites that made it impossible to figure out how to give money to a company as a normal person, but I don't think this is one of them.

What are you talking about? Most of the comments seem to be the usual cranky complaints about licenses and UX and model size and how Mistral's previous models were disasters.

And a huge tell for what? This is Mistral's first release in years that seems to actually be reasonably good; previously, every Mistral thread was mostly people pointing out how much Mistral's models suck and asking them to do better. Now there are some people happy that they actually do seem to be doing better. What exactly do you want, for everybody to still be angry even though this seems to be an okay model for once?

Source: trust me bro

Minor US state fines Meta $25B: After looking at Meta's financials, I guess they can afford it, no problem.