I find the antics of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft distasteful and avoid their products where I can.
After testing Le Chat and Devstral-2 for a while, I felt their offering was good enough to stump up some cash for it. I appreciate that many of their models are open weights and Apache 2.0 licensed. In general, I've been happy enough with the service and quality.
Maybe others are better, but I have little reason to change right now. If curiosity gets the better of me, I'll be looking at Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, other open weights models, before Anthropic and OpenAI.
Devstral Small 2 was (and remains) a particularly strong small coding model, even beating larger open weights. Mistral's "problem" is marketing; other providers ship model updates constantly so they remain in the news and seem like they're "beating" the competition. And it works: people get emotionally attached to brands and models, deciding who's better in the court of popular opinion, and that drives their choices (& dollars).
See: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
See some of the test results, it’s horrifying
Meanwhile Devstral Small 2 just answers the damn question.
I don't want to have to convince my computer to do what i want it to do, i want from it to do what i ask it to.
Devstral Small 2 however just works, for the most part. Qwen3.6 27B can probably handle more complex tasks (when i asked it as a test to write a function that checks for collision between two AABBs in C and gave it a tool to call Python code for confirmation, it actually wrote a Python script that writes C code with the tests, then calls GCC to compile the C code and runs the binary to run the tests, which is something Mistral's small models couldn't do) but i always felt i can just leave DS2 doing stuff in the background (or when i'm doing something else) and it'll produce something relatively useful whereas the little time i spent with Qwen3.6 27B it felt more "unstable" (and much slower, both because of literally slower inference and because of endless reams of text).
Recently i also started using Ministral 3B and 14B - these can do some reasoning too and for very simple stuff Ministral 3B is very fast (i actually didn't expect a 3B model to be anything more than novelty) and have some vision abilities (though they're quite mediocre at vision so i haven't found much use for this - passing something via GLM-OCR to extract all text and feed it to another model feels more practical).
Also as i wrote in another comment, every Mistral model i've tried never questioned me, which i certainly prefer
I think you'll find that ML now pretty much IS the HPC market, there's no distinction anymore. And the HPC market has always had the "being #1 gets you 99% of all business", even if #2 is only 10% behind SOTA.
Given what it's used for (ie. military applications, incl. nuclear weapons, but also rocket designs, flight planning, large-scale simulations), this is probably justifiable: part of it is states keeping in mind what the second prize in a war is worth ...
Being in the EU does smooth a lot of things in terms of compliance, payment processing and whatnot, but I also like that their data retention and privacy policies are pretty clearly spelled out. I need to know something, there's a good chance it's explained outright somewhere and I don't need to read between the EULA lines and wonder what it means.
I do hit limits in terms of capabilities sometimes, and I'm sure other providers' services offer better results for some things. But the businesses ran on top of those more capable models feel too much like a scam at this point and I'd rather not depend on them for anything I actually need.
Don’t think it’s inconceivable that the clowns in power decide to limit api access out of the blue one day because someone whispered a conspiracy theory in someone’s ear. API blockade…
See also the constant flip flopping on what cards NVIDIA can export - no consistency in stance or coherent policy
The thing with Anthropic and the military was about whether vendors can tell the military what operations it's permitted to do. It has no bearing on the commercial sector, and isn't actually about AI.
The thing with NVIDIA cards is a continuation of how we've restricted tech exports for quite a while. You can find old news articles about game consoles being export-restricted over nuclear proliferation concerns. This AI-related one was about whether or not custom AI models are relevant to national security, and whether restricting graphics card sales can have a meaningful impact on them.
Any issue with selling chat tokens internationally would be more akin to the recent tariff shenanigans.
Enough hardware and good models exist now that if you do get blocked from one place that viable alternatives do exist.
Thats true right up until you’re working with confidential info in a corporate context. Then it’s a multi month cross discipline cross jurisdiction project not an edit in a config file.
