Announcing 2 new non-open source models, and they won't even release the previous mistral medium? I did not expect... well I did expect this, but I did not think they would pivot so soon.
To commemorate the change, their website appears to have changed too. Their title used to be "Mistral AI | Open-Weight models" a few days ago[0].
It is now "Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands." [1]
Our products comes with transparent access to our weights, permitting full customisation. We don't want your data!
Committing to open models.
We believe in open science, community and free software. We release many of our models and deployment tools under permissive licenses. We benefit from the OSS community, and give back.
Edit: this is pretty fucking sad, and the fact that it's become expected is... I dunno, a tragedy? I mean, the whole point of anti-trust law was that monopolies like this are a net negative to the economy and to social and technological progress. They are BAD for business for everyone except the monopolist.
There really isn't though? I've not seen anything close to Mistral yet in the 7b space - and it's even going downhill, Gemma is a total joke surprisingly, almost non functional.
And raising prices to match that of the highest priced competitor (gpt-4-turbo), also owned by Microsoft. Is price fixing not evidence of monopolistic behaviour?
It’s so frustrating because there’s no downside in releasing the weights. OpenAI could open GPT 4 tomorrow and it wouldn’t meaningfully impact their revenue. No one has even tried.
> OpenAI could open GPT 4 tomorrow and it wouldn’t meaningfully impact their revenue.
I find this very difficult to believe, GPT-4 is still the best public model. If they hand out the weights other companies will immediately release APIs for it, cannibalizing OpenAI's API sales.
That’s the theory. In practice, it requires immense infrastructure to run it, let alone all the tooling and sales pipelines surrounding it. Companies are risk averse by definition, and in practice the risks are usually different than the ones you imagine from first principles.
It’s dumb. The first company to prove this will hopefully set an example that will be noticed.
It didn't take long for perplexity, anyscale, together.ai, groq, deepinfra, or lepton to all host mistral's 8x7B model, both faster and cheaper then Mistral's own api.
It's not really. And 8x7B is not a 7B model, it's a MoE that's closer to 60B that has to be kept in memory, and uses 2 experts per token so it runs at 15B speeds.
All of the current frameworks support MoE and sharding among GPUs so I don't see what the issue is.
Ollama makes it pretty easy to run inference on a bunch of model-available releases. If a company is after code/text generation, finding a company/contractor to fine tune one of the model-available releases on their source code, and have IT deploy Ollama to ask their employees with M3 MacBooks, decked out with 64 GiB of RAM is well within the abilities of a competent and well funded IT department.
What recognition has Facebook gotten for their model releases? How has that been priced into their stock price?
That's completely different scale. You're not going to run GPT4 like a random ollama model. At that point you need dedicated external hardware for the service, and proper batching/pipelining to utilise it well. This is way out of the "enough ram in the laptop area".
Sure, I understand people need to make money, but I draw the line at false or misleading advertising. They had open weights models in their page title man, I hold companies to higher standards than this. Also, I am not convinced open models would have precluded them from making money. There is nothing I've seen which says an open weights company cannot work. They may not become the first kajillionaire company in the world, but they can still make money.
I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.
The chef made his entire reputation by publishing cookbooks, and practically overnight pivoted from loudly proclaiming how important it was to share recipes to refusing to share anything and telling people to just eat at his restaurant.
Where this analogy falls flat, is the fact that I can take the "food", the model, and copy it an infinite amount of times, and use it to open my own, competing restaurant, who's food is as delicious as the original chef's. It'll differ some in presentation, but it's still gonna be a really really good cut of high end steak that was heated just right and melts in your mouth in all the right ways, without me having to put in any of the work it took to get there, which means my overhead is way lower. Suddenly, this chef has to compete with my fast food knock-off of their Michelin star restaurant. Some people like paying $400 for a meal for the experience, but it turns out more people just wanna be fed and are cheap, and can't or don't want to pay for the Michelin dining experience when the food is of equal quality in this tortured analogy. No one goes to the original chef's restaurant, and they go out of business.
The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.
> The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.
And if a person had a bunch of money/funding in their youth and made extravagant promises that they later reneged on because "oopsie actually I can't afford to do what I said I would", then they would be viewed as untrustworthy and we would expect them to be abandoned by the crowd that was hanging around them in the good times. And when it's not a person but a corporation, I see no reason to be at all sympathetic.
What do we think of the "friends" that hang around during the good times, and then abandon you when you're down?
But like you pointed out, it's a corporation and it's just business. If their next model is better but isn't made available, companies will still build an AI product on top of their model and give them money for a license or API access.
> What do we think of the "friends" that hang around during the good times, and then abandon you when you're down?
I deliberately didn't use the word "friends"; I'm well aware that neither the users nor the corporation really care about each other in this situation. That doesn't mean that you can go back on your entire claim to fame without consequence. And it's not that the company is "down" in some "did nothing wrong but suffered problems" sense; this situation is entirely of their own making.
> But like you pointed out, it's a corporation and it's just business. If their next model is better but isn't made available, companies will still build an AI product on top of their model and give them money for a license or API access.
Well... on the one hand, yes; just business. On the other, a sensible company wouldn't build it per-se on their API (especially now that they've shown how happy they are to change little things like "core values" and "entire business model"), they would build on a standardized API (probably OpenAI; that seems to be where the ecosystem is right now) and then... well, if this company happens to be competitive then good for them. But when they aren't, as you say, it's just business.
I think people are disappointed that some of the huge amounts of tax they pay don't go towards keeping some of this world changing tech open.
OpenAI became closed, same with Mistral - why don't EU, Mozilla, or whatever org make it so some of this tech remains in the open? We can apparently send trillions towards war and the all encompassing corruption surrounding that but are never agile in any other context where money is not getting siphoned off to some complex, i wonder why.
If "enshittification" includes "companies improving products but not making improvements available for free use by others", then it's a meaningless term.
Enshittification means companies breaking the social contract they started with, and in some cases like openAI completely reverse it. You can't have "Open Weights models" as your tag line and just proceed to become exactly not that. That is enshittification by any standards.
It's more about companies going from offering good value to their users, to extracting value from their userbase, and the changes to the produy along the way, as Cory Doctorow coined it.
Put that way, is Mistrial changiy directions not releasing future models that? I don't disagree that this move sucks, but it's not like they just changed a secret setting so their model you're currently running on your computer is now secretly uploading your incognito browsing habits to their servers. They changed what they're going to sell/release, going forwards, but that's it. No users got abused here, from my POV, but maybe I'm not seeing it.
No, enshittification as proposed as a term for marketplace operators or platform providers who slowly degrade the experience for dependent users in order to capture more of the value created. Mistral is not a platform; it's a technology vendor. You can apply words however arbitrarily you want, but it just makes them meaningless.
To commemorate the change, their website appears to have changed too. Their title used to be "Mistral AI | Open-Weight models" a few days ago[0].
It is now "Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands." [1]
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20240221172347/https://mistral.a...
[1]https://mistral.ai/