[HN Gopher] Mistral Saba
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Mistral Saba
Author : stephen37
Score : 130 points
Date : 2025-02-17 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Context on the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheba
| jorams wrote:
| That makes a lot more sense than the Saba I initially thought
| of[1]. The "specific geographies" seemed a bit overly specific.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saba_(island)
| yodon wrote:
| > Mistral Saba is a 24B parameter model trained on meticulously
| curated datasets from across the Middle East and South Asia.
| elashri wrote:
| That's interesting. It would be interesting to compare how this
| will fare against Fanar (Arabic oriented models) [1]. I got
| access to their API last week but still didn't play with it. I
| think they did pretty good job with arabic dialects [2]. I don't
| know if they have any plans to release weights though. There are
| two models one trained from scratch and the other ia fine turned
| of Google's Gemma.
|
| Saba vs fanar. I like the names too.
|
| [1] https://fanar.qa/en
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13944
| throwaway638637 wrote:
| It says south asia but the blog post is about Arabic. Where are
| the numbers on Urdu?
| hazrmard wrote:
| It's great to see proliferation of models in other languages!
|
| Shoutout to Alif, a finetune of Llama 3 8b on Urdu datasets:
| https://huggingface.co/large-traversaal/Alif-1.0-8B-Instruct
|
| It'd be great to see a comparison.
| laserduck wrote:
| I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and
| South Asia together. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages - no
| language from that family tree is native to the subcontinent. It
| would make sense if northern languages like Hindi, Urdu, Bengali,
| Nepali, etc were grouped with Persian, French, Russian, etc since
| those are all from the Indo-European family. South Indian
| languages like Telugu and Tamil are from a completely different
| family (Dravidian).
|
| Why not either train the model exclusively on Semitic languages
| for further performance for those languages or on a wider set of
| languages for better multilingual performance overall? I don't
| understand the logic here.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There is a lot of Indian laborers in the Middle East, so it's
| not that Tamil and Arabic are related, but a model used for
| that region should be fluent in both
| reallymental wrote:
| Not sure if you've been to the middle east, but there's no
| way the labourers will have access to the internet besides
| their phones. And those phones can only be used to
| communicate with their loved ones back home, using Whatsapp.
|
| They don't (or rather CAN) care about anything else in the
| world.
|
| They have a lot more problems than "this model doesn't
| convert urdu to arabic well".
| viraptor wrote:
| WhatsApp is a gateway to many things. Meta's Ai is on
| WhatsApp. Openai is on WhatsApp
| https://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/whatsapp-users-
| can... and I would really expect this model to have a
| WhatsApp gateway as well.
|
| > They have a lot more problems than "this model doesn't
| convert urdu to arabic well".
|
| I get what you mean, but I'm not sure what point you're
| trying to make. That they're a lost cause with too many
| problems and we shouldn't care about that use case? Why
| wouldn't we want to create models to provide more
| capabilities / information regardless?
| slim wrote:
| they still need to communicate with local administration
| via "citizen app"(whatever it is called) to access any
| service, pay their fines, etc...(and be tracked) I'm
| guessing the stake holder in this project is the government
| of qatar
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I wonder why they grouped languages from the Middle East and
| South Asia together
|
| Geography
| achrono wrote:
| There are a far greater number of speakers of Arabic in Germany
| (1.4M) [1] than in Afghanistan (420K) [2].
|
| So properly speaking, they should be advertising the target
| region as Europe, Middle East and Africa. [3]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Germany [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Afghanistan [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
| viraptor wrote:
| There's going to be diminishing returns in splitting the
| languages where you get less information related to the region
| / concept just because you're avoiding mixing languages. The
| language was not the only aspect: "cultural background, and in-
| depth regional knowledge". There's going to be lots of
| information shared in south/North languages just because of the
| geographically close (relatively anyway) distance.
|
| I mean you wouldn't want to split a model into 3 separate ones,
| where one contains Austrian, another Slovakian, and another
| Hungarian, since there's going to be lots of cultural overlap.
| diggan wrote:
| Considering they don't talk about licensing, one can assume this
| is proprietary?
|
| ~2 years ago (Sep 27, 2023), Mistral AI said:
|
| > we believe that an open approach to generative AI is necessary.
| Community-backed model development is the surest path to fight
| censorship and bias in a technology shaping our future. We
| strongly believe that by training our own models, releasing them
| openly, and fostering community contributions, we can build a
| credible alternative to the emerging AI oligopoly. Open-weight
| generative models will play a pivotal role in the upcoming AI
| revolution.
|
| > Mistral AI's mission is to spearhead the revolution of open
| models.
|
| https://mistral.ai/en/news/about-mistral-ai
|
| Did something change since then, or why did they have a change of
| hearts? Are they just doing a "OpenAI" and appear to believe in
| something in order to further their own cause, or does it have
| some particular reason behind it?
| JimDabell wrote:
| > One of the many custom-trained models to serve specific
| geographies, markets, and customers
|
| > Mistral Saba is a result of working closely with strategic
| regional customers to address very specific challenges in
| addressing bespoke use cases.
|
| It seems like a customer paid them to train this model, so
| presumably that customer gets to decide on licensing terms.
|
| Isn't this Mistral's business model? Make general purpose
| models available as open-source and train more specific models
| for their customers?
| diggan wrote:
| It's available on their API service, so I'd assume it's not
| one of the private models others pay them to create,
| otherwise it would be fully private to the customer. Or, the
| customer wants it to be released/open, then the customer
| would release it, not Mistral. But I might misunderstand how
| they operate, happy to correct what I understand.
|
| Edit: Actually, it is outlined in the bottom of the post:
|
| > we have also begun to train models for strategic customers
| with the power of their deep and proprietary enterprise
| context. These models stay exclusive and private to the
| respective customers. If you would like to explore custom
| training with Mistral AI, explore our applied AI offerings,
| or please contact us.
|
| So this is not one of those, as then it would be exclusive
| and private to the customer. This (Saba) is one of the models
| that I understood they would have released as at least "open-
| weights", if following their initial goals according to the
| early blog posts.
| Terretta wrote:
| GPT-4o mini keeps quietly demonstrating value per cost.
| homarp wrote:
| care to elaborate ?
|
| Saba: input $0.2/M tokens / Output $0.6 /M tokens
|
| GPT-4o Input: $0.15/M tokens Cached input:$0.075/M tokens
| Output:$0.6/1M tokens
|
| sources: https://openai.com/api/pricing/ and
| https://mistral.ai/en/products/la-plateforme#pricing
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(page generated 2025-02-17 23:02 UTC)