[HN Gopher] Mistral: Our first AI endpoints are available in ear...
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       Mistral: Our first AI endpoints are available in early access
        
       Author : georgehill
       Score  : 448 points
       Date   : 2023-12-11 08:03 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
        
       | georgehill wrote:
       | > Mistral-medium. Our highest-quality endpoint currently serves a
       | prototype model, that is currently among the top serviced models
       | available based on standard benchmarks.
       | 
       | This is interesting. This model outperforms ChatGPT 3.5. I'm not
       | sure what type of model it is, and it is not open-sourced.
        
         | eurekin wrote:
         | Ah! So that what, we're using in ollama is named the tiny
         | version?
         | 
         | > Mistral-tiny. Our most cost-effective endpoint currently
         | serves Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, a new minor release of Mistral
         | 7B Instruct. Mistral-tiny only works in English. It obtains 7.6
         | on MT-Bench. The instructed model can be downloaded here.
        
           | jug wrote:
           | Yeah. This naming is interesting and speaks of lofty goals
           | indeed. :)
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Tiny and small, those two have been released, yes.
        
       | rrsp wrote:
       | https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing
       | 
       | Pricing has been released too.
       | 
       | Per 1 million output tokens:
       | 
       | Mistral-medium $8
       | 
       | Mistral-small $1.94
       | 
       | gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 $2
       | 
       | gpt-4-1106-preview $30
       | 
       | gpt-4 $60
       | 
       | gpt-4-32k $120
       | 
       | This suggests that they're reasonably confident that the mistral-
       | medium model is substantially better than gpt3-5
        
         | dylanjcastillo wrote:
         | If you take input tokens in consideration is more like 5.25 eur
         | vs. 1.5 eur / million tokens overall.
         | 
         | Mistral-small seems to be the most direct competitor to gpt-3.5
         | and it's cheaper (1.2 eur / million tokens)
         | 
         | Note: I'm assuming equal weight for input and output tokens,
         | and cannot see the prices in USD :/
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | Does the 8x7B model really perform at a GPT-3.5 level? That
           | means we might see GPT-3.5 models running locally on our
           | phones in a few years.
        
             | anon373839 wrote:
             | That might be happening in a few _weeks_. There is a
             | credible claim that this model might be compressible to as
             | little as a 4GB memory footprint.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | You mean the 7B one? That's exciting if true, but if
               | compression means it can do 0.1 token/sec,it doesn't do
               | much for anyone.
        
               | infecto wrote:
               | Not true. Not everyone is building chat bot or similar
               | interface that requires output with latency low enough
               | for a user. While your example is of course incredibly
               | slow, there are still many interesting things that could
               | be done if it was a little bit quicker.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | What kind of use cases run in an environment where
               | latency isn't important (some kind of batch process?) but
               | don't have more than 4GB of RAM?
        
               | wongarsu wrote:
               | Price sensitive ones, or cases where you want the new
               | capability but can't get any new infrastructure.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Not LLMs, but locally running facial and object
               | recognition models on your phone's gallery, to build up a
               | database for face/object search in the gallery app? I'm
               | half-convinced this is how Samsung does it, but I can't
               | really be sure of much, because all the photo AI stuff
               | works _weirdly_ and in unobservable way, probably because
               | of some EU ruling.
               | 
               | (That one is a curious case. I once spent some time
               | trying to figure out why no major photo app seems to
               | support _manually tagging faces_ , which is a mind-
               | dumbingly _obvious_ feature to support, and which was
               | something supported by software a decade or so ago. I
               | couldn 't find anything definitive; there's this eerie
               | conspiracy of silence on the topic, that made me doubt my
               | own sanity at times. Eventually, I dug up hints that some
               | EU ruling/regs related to facial recognition led everyone
               | to remove or geolock this feature. Still nothing
               | specific, though.)
        
               | anon373839 wrote:
               | No, I am referring to the 7Bx8 MoE model. The MoE layers
               | apparently can be sparsified (or equivalently, quantized
               | down to a single bit per weight) with minimal loss of
               | quality.
               | 
               | Inference on a quantized model is faster, not slower.
               | 
               | However, I have no idea how practical it is to run a LLM
               | on a phone. I think it would run hot and waste the
               | battery.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Really? Well that's very exciting. I don't care about
               | wasting my battery if it can do my menial tasks for me,
               | battery is a currency I'd gladly pay for this use case.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Maybe this way, we'll not just get user-replaceable
               | batteries in smartphones back - maybe we'll get _hot-
               | swappable batteries_ for phones, as everyone will be
               | happy to carry a bag of extra batteries if it means using
               | advanced AI capabilities for the whole day, instead of 15
               | minutes.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Or maybe we'll finally get better batteries!
               | 
               | Though I guess that's not for lack of trying.
        
               | brandall10 wrote:
               | I think we're at least a couple generations away where
               | this is feasible for these models, unless say it's for
               | performing a limited number of background tasks at fairly
               | slow inference speed. SOC power draw limits will probably
               | limit inference speed to about 2-5 tok/sec (lower end for
               | Mixtral which has the processing requirements of a 14B)
               | and would suck an iPhone Max dry in about an hour.
        
               | gardenhedge wrote:
               | How/where do you stay up to date with this stuff?
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ is pretty good, it
               | is a bit fanboy-ey, but those kinds of sites are where
               | you get the _good_ news.
        
         | code51 wrote:
         | gpt-3.5 is heavily subsidized.
         | 
         | Mistral may just be aiming for a more sustainable price for the
         | long run.
        
           | ipsum2 wrote:
           | What's your evidence for that claim?
        
             | tirpen wrote:
             | They wrote "may", it was clearly speculation about one
             | possible explanation, not an absolute statement of truth.
        
         | raverbashing wrote:
         | Do they all use the same tokenizer? (I mean, Mistral vs GPT)
        
           | superkuh wrote:
           | No. Mistral uses sentencepiece and the GPT use tiktoken.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | > This suggests that they're reasonably confident that the
         | mistral-medium model is substantially better than gpt3-5
         | 
         | How did you reach the conclusion? Maybe they are counting on
         | people paying extra just to prevent vendor lockdown.
        
         | infecto wrote:
         | I don't think it's safe to assume any of this. It's still
         | limited release which reads as invite only. Once it hits some
         | kind of GA then we can test and verify.
        
           | raincole wrote:
           | It's safe to assume they are confident it's better than 3.5.
           | But people can be confident and wrong.
        
             | infecto wrote:
             | We won't know anything until it becomes a wider release and
             | can test it.
        
               | ilaksh wrote:
               | Multiple people have tested it. Code and weights are
               | fully released .
        
               | rockinghigh wrote:
               | Mistral-medium has not been released yet.
        
         | epups wrote:
         | I understand how Mistral could end up being the most popular
         | open source LLM model for the foreseeable future. What I cannot
         | understand is who they expect to convince to pay for their API.
         | As long as you are shipping your data to a third-party, whether
         | they are running an open or closed source model is
         | inconsequential.
        
           | chadash wrote:
           | I pay for hosted databases all the time. It's more
           | convenient. But those same databases are popular because they
           | are open source.
           | 
           | I also know that because it's open source, if I ever have a
           | need to, I can host it on my own servers. Currently I don't
           | have that need, but it's nice to know that it's in the cards.
        
             | epups wrote:
             | Open source databases are SOTA or very close to it, though.
             | Here the value proposition is to pay 10-50% less for an
             | inferior product. Portability is definitely an advantage,
             | but that's another aspect which I think detracts from their
             | value: if I can run this anywhere, I will either host it
             | myself or pay whoever can make it happen very cheap. Even
             | OpenAI could host an API for Mistral.
        
               | chadash wrote:
               | > Here the value proposition is to pay 10-50% less for an
               | inferior product.
               | 
               | OpenAI just went through an existential crisis where the
               | company almost collapsed. They are also quite unreliable.
               | For some use cases, I'll take a service that does
               | slightly worse on outputs, but much better on
               | reliability. For example, if I'm building a customer
               | service chat bot, it's a pretty big deal if the LLM
               | backend goes down. With an open-source model, I can build
               | it using the cloud provider. If they are a reliable host,
               | i'll probably stick with them as i grow. If not, I always
               | have the option of running the model myself. This
               | alleviates a lot of the risk.
        
           | baq wrote:
           | Same reason why you would use GPT-4. Plenty of people pay for
           | that, some pay really good money.
        
           | vidarh wrote:
           | You may be fine with shipping your data to OpenAI or Mistral,
           | but worry about what happens if they change terms or if their
           | future models change in a way that causes problems for you,
           | or if they go bankrupt. In any of those cases, knowing you
           | can take the model and run it yourself (or hire someone else
           | to run it for you) mitigates risk. Whether those risks matter
           | enough will of course differ wildly.
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | The big advantage of a hosted open model is insurance against
           | model changes.
           | 
           | If you carefully craft and evaluate your more complex prompts
           | against a closed model... and then that model is retired, you
           | need to redo that process.
           | 
           | A lot of people were burned when OpenAI withdrew Codex, for
           | example. I think that was a poor decision by OpenAI as it
           | illustrated this exact risk.
           | 
           | If the hosted model you are using is open, you have options
           | for continuing to use it should the host decide to stop
           | offering it.
        
         | raphaelj wrote:
         | Do we have estimates of the energy requirements for these
         | models?
         | 
         | I just did some napkin math, looks like inference on a 30B
         | model with a GTX 4090 should get you about 30 tokens/sec [1],
         | or 100k tokens/hour.
         | 
         | Considering such systems consume about 1 kW, that's about 10
         | kWh/1M tokens.
         | 
         | Based on the current cost of electricity, I don't think anyone
         | could get below 2 ~ 4 $ per 1M token for a 30B model.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/13j5cxf/how_man...
        
           | Filligree wrote:
           | The 4090 is considerably more power-hungry compared to e.g.
           | an A100, however.
        
             | fpgaminer wrote:
             | If comparing apples to apples, the 4090 needs to clock up
             | and consume about 450 W to match the A100 at 350W. Part of
             | that is due to being able to run larger batches on the
             | A100, which gives it an additional performance edge, but
             | yes in general the A100 is more power efficient.
        
           | jillesvangurp wrote:
           | Depends how and where you source your energy. If you invest
           | in your own solar panels and batteries, all that energy is
           | essentially fixed price (cost of the infrastructure)
           | amortized over the lifetime of the setup (1-2 decades or so).
           | Maybe you have some variable pricing on top for grid
           | connectivity and use the grid as a fallback. But there's also
           | the notion of selling excess energy back to the grid that
           | offsets that.
           | 
           | So, 10kwh could be a lot less than what you cite. That's also
           | how grid operators make money. They generate cheaply and sell
           | with a nice margin. Prices are determined by the most
           | expensive energy sources on the grid in some markets (coal,
           | nuclear, etc.). So, that pricing doesn't reflect actual cost
           | for renewables, which is typically a lot lower than that.
           | Anyone consuming large amounts of energy will be looking to
           | cut their cost. For data centers that typically means
           | investing in energy generation, storage, and efficient
           | hardware and cooling.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | During the crypto boom there were crypto miners in China
             | who got really cheap electricity from hydroelectric dams
             | built in rural areas. Shipping electricity long distance is
             | expensive (both in terms of infrastructure and losses -
             | unless you pay even more for HVDC infrastructure), so they
             | were able to get great prices as local consumers of
             | "surplus" energy.
             | 
             | That might be a great opportunity for cheap LLMs too.
        
           | avereveard wrote:
           | Batching changes that equation a fair bit. Also these cards
           | will not consume full power since llm are mostly limited by
           | memory bandwidth and the processing part will get some idle
           | time.
        
           | kaliqt wrote:
           | Well the 4090 is certainly less efficient on this. They are
           | using H100's or better no doubt. If they optimize for TPUs,
           | it'll be even better.
        
           | filterfiber wrote:
           | FWIW - I need to remeasure but - IIRC my system with a 4090
           | only uses ~500w (maybe up to 600w) during inference of LLMs,
           | the LLMs have a lot harder time saturating the compute
           | compared to stable diffusion I'm assuming because of the VRAM
           | speed (and this is all on-card, nothing swapping from system
           | memory). The 4090 itself only really used 300~400w most of
           | the time because of this.
           | 
           | If you consider 600w for the entire system, that's only
           | 6kWh/1M token, for me 6kWh @0.2USD/kWh is 1.2USD/1M tokens.
           | 
           | And that's without the power efficiency improvements that an
           | H100 has over the 4090. So I think 2$/1M should be achievable
           | once you combine the efficiencies of H100s+batching, etc.
           | Since LLM's generally dwarf the network delay anyway, you
           | could host in places like washington for dirt cheap prices
           | (their residential prices are almost half of what I used for
           | calculations)
        
             | modeless wrote:
             | Are you using batch size 1 with LLMs? Larger batch sizes
             | get much higher utilization.
        
             | huytersd wrote:
             | Well with those numbers, I pay $0.1/kWh so theoretically
             | $0.6/1M tokens
        
           | singhrac wrote:
           | Is $0.2-0.4/kWh a good estimate for price paid in a data
           | center? That's pretty expensive for energy, and I think vPPA
           | prices at big data centers are much lower (I think 0.1 is a
           | decent upper bound in the US, though I could see EU being
           | more expensive by 2x).
        
           | airgapstopgap wrote:
           | Mistral-small explicitly has inference costs of a 12.9b, but
           | more than that, it's probably ran with batch size of 32 or
           | higher. They'll worry more about offsetting training costs
           | than about this.
           | 
           | Here's how it works in reality:
           | 
           | https://docs.mystic.ai/docs/mistral-ai-7b-vllm-fast-
           | inferenc...
        
           | brandall10 wrote:
           | I get 40 tok/sec on my M3 Max on various 34B models, I gather
           | a desktop 4090 would be at least 80?
        
         | up6w6 wrote:
         | I think the medium is trying to compete with Anthropic's Claude
         | than Openai's products
         | 
         | https://www-files.anthropic.com/production/images/model_pric...
        
       | yzydserd wrote:
       | "endpoints are available in early access" is in reality "we have
       | a waitlist (of unspecified length) for early access to endpoints"
       | 
       | When I try to access: "Access to our API is currently invitation-
       | only, but we'll let you know when you can subscribe to get access
       | to our best models."
        
         | Semaphor wrote:
         | Considering that their email verification has been in different
         | states of brokenness for the last hour, I'm guessing they were
         | not as ready as they thought for the publicity ;)
        
       | ur-whale wrote:
       | This actually begs the question:
       | 
       | Does anyone know the kind of actual infrastructure something like
       | gpt4-32k actually run on?
       | 
       | I mean when I actually type something in the prompt, what
       | actually happens behind the scenes?
       | 
       | Is the answer computed on a single NVidia GPU?
       | 
       | Or is it dedicated H/W not known to the general public?
       | 
       | How big is that GPU?
       | 
       | How much RAM does it have?
       | 
       | Is my conversation run by a single GPU instance that is dedicated
       | to me or is that GPU shared by multiple users?
       | 
       | If the latter, how many queries per seconds can a single GPU
       | handle?
       | 
       | Where is that GPU?
       | 
       | Does it run in an Azure data center?
       | 
       | Is the API usage cost actually reflective of the HW cost or is it
       | heavily subsidized?
       | 
       | Is a single GPU RAM size the bottleneck for how large a model can
       | be?
       | 
       | Is any of that info public ?
        
         | Closi wrote:
         | While we can't be sure of most of those answers, they have
         | stated it is running in Azure.
         | 
         | Also we can probably assume the pricing is likely to be
         | _somewhat_ in proportion to the cost to run (possibly
         | subsidised to gain market, but they are unlikely to be taking a
         | giant /unsustainable loss per query here, particularly as they
         | seem to announce price decreases when they increase model
         | performance).
        
         | amir734jj wrote:
         | Azure VMSS (uniform orchestration) + 2000 to 3000 GPU enabled
         | servers. I'm not sure about what kind of GPU is on these
         | servers.
        
         | dataking wrote:
         | > Is the answer computed on a single NVidia GPU?
         | 
         | Most likely given that one of their open positions for a GPU
         | programmer includes
         | 
         | > high technical competence for writing custom CUDA kernels and
         | pushing GPUs to their limits.
         | 
         | Edit: only narrows it down to NVidia hardware, IDK if single
         | GPU or not.
        
         | willyyr wrote:
         | Mark Russinovich shares some of it in this recent Ignite
         | session: https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-
         | US/sessions/49347847-9ae4-43... *I work at Microsoft but have
         | nothing to do with the datacenter engineering or other insights
         | into the details behind it.
        
           | zurfer wrote:
           | So 14400 H100 for GPT-4, but that's just a fraction of the
           | new system that Azure is building for OpenAI.
           | 
           | FWIW, I most enjoyed the 29TB machine demo at the end.
        
       | tarruda wrote:
       | > Mistral-embed, our embedding endpoint, serves an embedding
       | model with a 1024 embedding dimension. Our embedding model has
       | been designed with retrieval capabilities in mind. It achieves a
       | retrieval score of 55.26 on MTEB.
       | 
       | Is there any information if this embedding model is or will be
       | open source?
        
       | infecto wrote:
       | Until we can verify, I think it's safe to place the in the smoke
       | category. It's invite only so until it hits GA it's impossible to
       | know if the pricing is real and the true capabilities of what
       | they are offering.
        
       | jacquesm wrote:
       | dupe, see:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598559
        
         | codetrotter wrote:
         | They are two different news about one thing. Not dupe.
        
           | InCityDreams wrote:
           | >They are two different news about one thing.
           | 
           | Then they'd be differing opinions?
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | By the same submitter, minutes apart and both on the
           | homepage.
        
       | georgehill wrote:
       | > Mistral-Medium outperforms GPT-4 in Winogrande benchmark 88% vs
       | 87.5%
       | 
       | from: https://twitter.com/yupiop12/status/1734137238177698106
        
       | ingojoseph wrote:
       | It's interesting that many platforms, like Lemonfox.ai, offer
       | Mistral finetunes at lower prices. They also already announced a
       | Mistral 8x7B API. This raises the question of whether they'll
       | still publish future models as open-source (like the Medium
       | version) if they want to make money.
        
         | jumpCastle wrote:
         | Without open weights why would anyone care about them? By the
         | time they could compete with gpt4 there's probably be gpt5
         | already.
        
       | Palmik wrote:
       | This is extremely impressive if benchmarks translate to real-
       | world performance [1]. The mistral-medium beats GPT3.5 and also
       | Gemini Pro (Google's best available model) with a huge margin on
       | all available comparable benchmarks:
       | https://screenbud.com/shot/c0d904e3-24a3-4c23-a1e4-2f18bc021...
       | 
       | [1] I would expect real world-performance gap to be even larger
       | if Mistral 7B is anything to go by. The fact that safety filters
       | are opt-in is a huge benefit (even for safe applications).
        
         | monlockandkey wrote:
         | This is crazy. If they release this new model as open source,
         | that would be very exciting!
        
           | Aerbil313 wrote:
           | They already did, weights on Twitter.
        
             | JimDabell wrote:
             | No, they've released the weights for Mistral-small. They
             | haven't released the weights for Mistral-medium.
        
             | samtheprogram wrote:
             | They might've been referring to mistral-medium, the larger
             | version, which is not open source. The open-sourced version
             | was the small variant.
        
         | usaar333 wrote:
         | Higher Winogrande score than GPT-4. Surprising given others are
         | more GPT-3ish
        
         | logicchains wrote:
         | >also Gemini Pro (Google's best available model)
         | 
         | Pretty sad for Google if their next big AI thing is already
         | being beaten by a small company with a tiny fraction of their
         | resources.
        
           | margorczynski wrote:
           | Google in general looks like they're lost their touch and are
           | kinda on a downward spiral. Trying to squeeze out as much as
           | they can from Youtube is I think a major sign of that,
           | usually attempts like that start to pop up in burnt-out
           | companies that are heading to their end.
           | 
           | As for AI they have a lot of world-class talent but they
           | somehow cannot transform that into a coherent product even
           | though they did amazing stuff on the research side. It has
           | been brought up many times on HN on how Google has a product-
           | design problem and it seems to be true.
        
           | tomjen3 wrote:
           | Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you
           | and summerize the results is both way more expensive than
           | normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown.
           | 
           | Google can't do anything about it either - consumers will
           | prefer the chat approach and will go where it is offered.
           | Google has to offer it, or people will go to ChatGpt and
           | Bing, but at the same time they lose a lot of money each time
           | people opt for the chat summary.
           | 
           | It is way expensive for Bing too, but they don't care because
           | their market is growing and since the only thing people used
           | to search Bing for was how to download Chrome and how to
           | change the default browser, they aren't losing a lot this
           | way.
        
             | AaronFriel wrote:
             | Imagine a search engine that tries to persuade you a
             | sponsored product is the answer to your problems, and it
             | can use its knowledge about you to do so.
             | 
             | I think search products will be OK - it will just be
             | stranger than we expect.
        
             | jamiek88 wrote:
             | Big was used for porn. Don't forget porn. Torrents too.
             | 
             | Bing going legit and genuinely threatening google wasn't on
             | my bingo card for sure.
        
               | eastbound wrote:
               | And honest content. One order of magnitude more honest at
               | least; Google is like asking the Kremlin for truth.
        
             | sangnoir wrote:
             | > Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for
             | you and summerize the results is both way more expensive
             | than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown
             | 
             | But those ads would be compelling and more valuable. There
             | is no reason to believe the current inference LLM
             | architecture is the optimal one (as shown by Mistral's MoE)
             | - future inference will likely be cheaper than it is
             | currently.
             | 
             | The sentiment that Google's goose is cooked I'm seeing in
             | this thread seems like wish-fulfillment to me. Especially
             | considering that the upstarts also don't have a clear road
             | to profitability
        
               | tomjen3 wrote:
               | OpenAI can raise a ton of more cash, so they may not have
               | a road to profitability yet, but they have long time
               | before they crash.
        
             | danenania wrote:
             | One area Google has a big advantage is in its massive
             | crawling and indexing infrastructure. As good as ChatGPT
             | plus is, the search with Bing feature is so. damn. slow. It
             | seems do be doing a normal search request in the background
             | rather than using any kind of index, and multiple links are
             | visited serially rather than concurrently. Did I mention
             | that it's slow?
             | 
             | That's a large and difficult problem obviously and one
             | Google is clearly well-positioned for if they can ever
             | catch up on the model front.
        
           | rmbyrro wrote:
           | It does look like Google will be the Yahoo of 2030
           | 
           | Perhaps even sooner, given the pace tech is evolving nowadays
           | comparing to when Google took over Yahoo's place.
        
             | spaceman_2020 wrote:
             | They deserve it. Google is one of the big reasons why the
             | web is the way it is today - bloated, spammy, overly SEO-
             | optimized.
        
               | sevagh wrote:
               | Not sure if it's a conspiracy theory or a known thing but
               | I read it once and it stuck in my mind that Google's
               | projects are a form of distraction and friction to
               | prevent people catching up with them (e.g. HTTP3).
        
               | painted-now wrote:
               | I'm not sure I follow: what kind of Google projects are
               | you talking about? Google internal ones or external ones?
               | And depending on the answer, who should get distracted by
               | it? ... aaaand then in the end, catching up to what?
        
               | jakub_g wrote:
               | Google is solving problems at Google scale, where
               | improving something by 2% yields millions.
               | 
               | Re: "distracting other companies", there's however this
               | famous essay by Joel Spolsky (2002):
               | 
               | https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-
               | motion/
               | 
               | > Think of the history of data access strategies to come
               | out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET
               | - All New! Are these technological imperatives? The
               | result of an incompetent design group that needs to
               | reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably
               | it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The
               | competition has no choice but to spend all their time
               | porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend
               | writing new features. Look closely at the software
               | landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who
               | rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all
               | their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing
               | bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who
               | stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea
               | leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft.
               | People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their
               | whole architecture for .NET because they think they have
               | to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover
               | fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because
               | this is how the game is played, Bubby.
        
               | carstenhag wrote:
               | But we did get faster browsers, pretty cool browser tech.
               | Also, Google search results have page loading speed
               | factored in, which is also a plug for everyone.
        
               | GuB-42 wrote:
               | You probably don't remember how the web just before
               | Google. Just as bloated, spammy and SEO-optimized as it
               | is today, just more primitive tech-wise. Bloat was
               | measured in kb, but it was significant on dialup, spam
               | was crude, but so were the blocking solutions, and SEO
               | was hidden lists keywords, which was enough to heavily
               | influence search results.
               | 
               | In fact Google did a lot against it. Google search was
               | clean, fast, and with no ads, GMail had one of the best
               | spam filters, and Google algorithms were highly resistant
               | to SEO of the time. Time have passed, Google is now part
               | of the problem, but it is not alone there, and for some
               | time, Google really did good.
        
           | GuB-42 wrote:
           | Google was once a small company beating some big players with
           | a fraction of their resources.
        
         | willsmith72 wrote:
         | > Gemini Pro (Google's best available model)
         | 
         | It's not really "available" though, is it? I won't buy any PR
         | benchmarks until the models are publicly available, there's too
         | much variation based on how the models need to toned back for
         | safety reasons before being released to the public
        
       | ianpurton wrote:
       | So, what would be the hardware setup for this?
       | 
       | Can it run on 1 GPU and swap between experts.
        
       | LanzVonL wrote:
       | Two out of the top three stories today on HN! What an
       | achievement. Is mistral.ai a YC property?
        
       | marviel wrote:
       | > Our API follows the specifications of the popular chat
       | interface initially proposed by our dearest competitor.
       | 
       | I like it, also made me laugh
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I just signed up for the API waiting list. I have been enjoying
       | running Mistral-7B on my home system, and it feels right to give
       | them some of my paid for API business.
        
       | rgbrgb wrote:
       | > Mistral-tiny. Our most cost-effective endpoint currently serves
       | Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, a new minor release of Mistral 7B
       | Instruct. Mistral-tiny only works in English. It obtains 7.6 on
       | MT-Bench. The instructed model can be downloaded here.
       | 
       | "download here" link is to v0.1 [0]. Oversight or are they
       | holding back the state of the art tiny model?
       | 
       | [0]: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1
        
         | Evan-Almloff wrote:
         | It's here:
         | https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2
        
       | ComputerGuru wrote:
       | I'm surprised no one has commented on the context size
       | limitations of these offerings when comparing to the other
       | models. The sliding window technique really does effectively
       | cripple its recall to approximately just 8k tokens which is just
       | plain insufficient for a lot of tasks.
       | 
       | All these llama2 derivatives are only effective if you fine tune
       | them, not just because of the parameter count as people keep
       | harping but perhaps even more so because of the tiny context
       | available.
       | 
       | A lot of my GPT3.5/4 usage involves "one offs" where it would be
       | faster to do the thing by hand than to train/fine-tune first,
       | made possible because of the generous context window and some
       | amount of modest context stuffing (drives up input token costs
       | but still a big win).
        
         | logicchains wrote:
         | >The sliding window technique really does effectively cripple
         | its recall to approximately just 8k tokens which is just plain
         | insufficient for a lot of tasks.
         | 
         | What are you basing this observation on; personal experience,
         | or is there a benchmark somewhere confirming it?
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | Real world testing and experience. If you only need the llm
           | to retain the "gist" of the input tokens in order to return a
           | "related" answer, the sliding window design is fine. But if
           | you need actual technical analysis or tasks that involve
           | verbatim referencing, quoting, recomposing, etc based off
           | parts of the input documents, it doesn't work.
           | 
           | I tried using it for "business document" use cases but have
           | ran into this with code as well; the latter might be a better
           | explanation given where we're having this discussion. If you
           | only need the llm to retain the general shape of your inputs
           | so it can reuse them to influence the output, the sliding
           | context is fine. But if you need it to actually reuse code
           | verbatim from the input that you fed it (or to remember the
           | api calls and their surrounding context verbatim to recall
           | from a sample of just one that this api must be called before
           | that api, when the prompt includes instructions to that
           | effect) the "decomposition" of the input tokens with the
           | sliding model is insufficient and the llm completely fails at
           | the assigned task.
        
           | cameroncairns wrote:
           | I found this discussion on the local llama subreddit that
           | digs a little bit more into what effects the sliding window
           | might have, in case you or anyone else reading this comment
           | thread finds it interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLL
           | aMA/comments/17k2mwq/i_dont_....
           | 
           | It refers to the original Mistral 7B though not the new
           | Mixtral fwiw
        
         | rockinghigh wrote:
         | Mixtral 8X7B has a 32k-token context window. GPT-3.5 models
         | have a context window of 4k-16k. As for the sliding window
         | attention, the model does not lose all the information about
         | the tokens before the sliding window. Hidden states store
         | information about past tokens.
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | The sliding window does not _lose_ the data but it does
           | "decompose" it so that it can't be recalled verbatim. For
           | analyzing code (feed it n classes and ask it to create a
           | class using all of them to accomplish a task) that isn't good
           | enough. It's also not good enough for some of the "corporate
           | business" use cases we tried putting Mistral and other
           | sliding window models to use on, where you need it to re-use
           | verbatim or reference specific portions of one of n documents
           | fed into it as input tokens.
           | 
           | Again, sufficient training can overcome these limitations.
           | But that's only for cases where the corpus of input documents
           | is static or at least contains significant reuse.
        
       | brandall10 wrote:
       | I'm surprised this isn't firmly attached to the top of HN right
       | now for the entire day.
       | 
       | This is a tiny company (appears 30 or so people?) that just
       | scored a 2B valuation, produced easily the most performant 7B
       | model and a 7B*8 MOE model that performs at the level of a 70B
       | requiring the inference power of a 14B.
       | 
       | I feel this could be a potential bigger threat to OpenAI than
       | Google or Anthropic. I gather with the huge recent investment
       | they'll be able to a) scale out to a reasonable traffic load in
       | the near future and b) attract the best and brightest researchers
       | put off w/ various chest puffing and drama that has been front
       | and center in this industry.
        
         | huevosabio wrote:
         | Agreed. By far the most impressive company out of the current
         | AI wave.
         | 
         | They managed to put out the gold standard for 7B models in like
         | 6 months, and are quickly moving up the scale.
         | 
         | I mocked the funding round back in March as being signs of
         | hype, ($300m for a team of 3 with just an idea?) but clearly I
         | didn't know the details. Really remarkable execution.
         | 
         | They may well be on their way to eat all use cases that don't
         | need gpt-4 performance and hopefully soon tackle the big
         | leagues as well. Exciting times!
        
           | appplication wrote:
           | In some ways I see this as a sign that LLMs possibly aren't
           | that hard to iterate on now that the cat is out of the bag. A
           | small team can push the state of the art in just 6 months? It
           | feels like this is more a circumstance of the state of LLMs
           | presently and less a statement on Mistral. I wouldn't it be
           | surprised if we see 10+ other new $1B+ companies spring up
           | because of how much room for improvement there is in the
           | space.
        
             | a_wild_dandan wrote:
             | Well said. OpenAI's biggest contribution wasn't serving
             | GPT-4, it was proving that big LLMs are AGIs. Rushing to
             | gold is easy; discovering it ain't. Since we've found a
             | correct path, low-hanging fruit is plentiful. Throw more
             | compute at it. Work smarter not harder (optimize). Graft on
             | simple ideas for big gainz (e.g. RAG, MoE, chain-of-
             | thought, etc). We moved from "GPT Who?" to...all of this,
             | _in a year_. I now run an AGI at a bookish 13-year-old 's
             | level on my MacBook. The trend of hardware/software
             | advances are astonishing. And this is just the beginning.
        
         | ru552 wrote:
         | Mistral is in France though and the EU is throwing cold water
         | on "AI" at the moment. I think this hurts them in the long run.
        
           | pavlov wrote:
           | Or it could help them be more globally competitive because
           | they'll have built their product to accommodate the EU rules
           | and will be ready if/when other countries introduce something
           | similar.
           | 
           | Maybe in 1970 someone was arguing that Volvo is handicapped
           | because Swedish safety regulations have become so stringent
           | that their cars can't compete on price elsewhere. Turns out
           | it was exactly Volvo's strength to be ahead of the curve on
           | regulation.
        
             | dmix wrote:
             | Regulations are accumulative though, not just relative to
             | your era. So a critique in 2023 would be more relevant than
             | one in 1970 as the pure scale of it has increased
             | dramatically.
             | 
             | I've seen a few graphs showing staffing counts and budgets
             | for US regulatory agencies have grown exponentially since
             | the 1970s (adjusted for inflation), while it was relatively
             | flat before then in the 60s. Economic regulation growth in
             | the US has grown steadily while social regulations
             | (workplace, climate, healthcare, transportation etc) grew
             | dramatically. Adding in TSA / Homeland security and it's a
             | hockey stick.
             | 
             | https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/z
             | a...
             | 
             | I'd be curious to see similar charts for the EU.
        
               | pavlov wrote:
               | The EU's new AI Act is the first regulatory action in the
               | world targeted specifically at AI models. In that sense
               | it's now 1970 for this domain specifically.
        
               | gopher_space wrote:
               | In a democracy I'd expect regulation to grow alongside
               | population and productivity. It would be interesting if
               | it didn't, actually.
        
             | ru552 wrote:
             | It's possible, but the AI space right now is all about the
             | vibes and even the French President isn't feeling it[0].
             | The job market for AI/ML people is white hot right now and
             | this is something Mistral has to try to explain around in
             | an interview. I hope they do well despite it.
             | 
             | [0]https://www.ft.com/content/9339d104-7b0c-42b8-9316-72226
             | dd4e...
        
             | TacticalCoder wrote:
             | > Turns out it was exactly Volvo's strength to be ahead of
             | the curve on regulation.
             | 
             | That's a weird analogy. I don't remember Volvo ever being
             | that big. If anything they're bigger now than they used to
             | be (I mean: I don't remember a world with lots of Volvo
             | when I was a kid... I may be wrong though). And with about
             | 650 000 vehicles sold per year they're not in the Top 25
             | car manufacturer worldwide by number of cars sold.
        
           | zonethundery wrote:
           | Have to see the final text, of course, but open source models
           | apparently got some breaks in the final agreement last
           | Friday.
        
           | _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
           | The EU makes in it's proposed law a lot of exceptions for
           | open models. It might be a big selling point for mistral (or
           | Facebook) but maybe tricky to deal with for closed models
           | like OpenAI.
        
         | dmix wrote:
         | > I'm surprised this isn't firmly attached to the top of HN
         | right now for the entire day.
         | 
         | It's kind of hard to tell what it is from both the blog post
         | and their homepage. So only people really familiar with AI will
         | grasp the relevance. But your comment certainly helps.
        
         | 0xDEF wrote:
         | French engineering and computer science education really
         | emphasizes math and theory. That is an advantage in AI.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | It's because there have been quite a few big threads already:
         | 
         |  _Mixtral of experts_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598559 - Dec 2023 (272
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Mistral-8x7B-Chat_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594578 - Dec 2023 (69
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Mistral AI Valued at $2B_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38593616 - Dec 2023 (221
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Mistral 's mixtral-8x7B-32kseqlen on Vercel_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584179 - Dec 2023 (30
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _French AI startup Mistral secures EUR2B valuation_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580758 - Dec 2023 (76
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Mistral "Mixtral" 8x7B 32k model [magnet]_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38570537 - Dec 2023 (236
         | comments)
         | 
         | I know these are not all the same exact story but the
         | discussions end up being more or less generically the same, so
         | we can call them all (or most of them) quasidupes.
        
       | davidkunz wrote:
       | Well done, Mistral! "Show, don't tell" par excellence.
        
       | hospitalJail wrote:
       | Is there anything Mistral + tuned on ChatGPT4?
        
       | munro wrote:
       | Wow, beating ChatGPT-3.5 is really an accomplishment. Congrats!
       | That's literally the default of OpenAI's product. I had to
       | fallback to GPT-3.5 the other day because I ran out of usage on
       | ChatGPT-4 (playing 20 questions lol). So I really hope someone
       | can come up on GPT-4! For me GPT-3.5 isn't good enough for daily
       | things, it gets too much wrong.
        
       | lioeters wrote:
       | By chance I noticed that Fabrice Bellard's TextSynth server has
       | newly added support for Mistral 7B model.
       | 
       | > 2023-10-21: CUDA support in the Windows version, mistral model
       | support. Speculative sampling is supported. BNF grammar and JSON
       | schema sampling.
       | 
       | > mistral_7B_instruct_q4 - 3.9GB - Mistral 7B chat model
       | 
       | https://bellard.org/ts_server/
        
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