[HN Gopher] Mistral Releases Deep Research, Voice, Projects in L...
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Mistral Releases Deep Research, Voice, Projects in Le Chat
Author : pember
Score : 381 points
Date : 2025-07-17 15:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| jddj wrote:
| The examples aren't great. The personal planning one for example
| answers the prompt better without deep research than with (with
| answers only the Visas point)
| tdhz77 wrote:
| I'm struggling with MRF. Model Release Fatigue. It's a syndrome
| of constantly context switching new large models. Claude 4, gpt,
| llama, Gemini 2.5, pro-mini, mistrial.
|
| I fire off the ide switch the model and think oh great this is
| better. I switch to something that worked before and man, this
| sucks now.
|
| Context switching llm, Model Release Fatigue
| didibear wrote:
| I believe perfs of previous versions are worse because
| providers reallocate resources to newer versions. Also because
| of training data cut-off to previous years. This is what
| happened between claude sonnet 3.5 and 3.7.
|
| Personally I only use Claude/Anthropic and ignore other
| providers because I understand it the more. It's smart enough,
| I rarely need the latest greatest.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| Why do you even follow? Just stick to one that works well for
| you?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Totally, I feel like though you do have to pay some attention
| for example in the context I'm working on, for the last
| while, Gemini was our gold standard for code generation
| whereas today, Claude subjectively produces the better
| results. Sure you can stick to what worked abut then you're
| missing the opportunity to be more productive or less busy,
| whichever one you choose.
| exe34 wrote:
| I remember the days when I was looking for the perfect
| note-taking system/setup - I never achieved anything with
| it, I was too busy figuring out the best way to take notes.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Once we find the best way though...
| tartoran wrote:
| FOMO may be one of the reasons amongst others.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| What a luxury!
|
| One way to avoid this: stick with one LLM and bet on the
| company behind it (meaning, over time, they'll always have the
| best offering). I've bet on OpenAI. Others can make different
| conclusions.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| When the medicine is worse than the disease...
| criemen wrote:
| I totally get it. Due to my work, I mostly keep up with new
| model releases, but the pace is not sustainable for
| individuals, or the industry. I'm hoping that model releases
| (and the entire development speed of the field) will slow down
| over time, as LLMs mature and most low-hanging fruits in model
| training have been picked. Are we there yet? Surely not.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A major reason I haven't really tried any of these things
| (despite thinking they are vaguely neat). I think I will wait
| until... 2026, second half, most likely. At least I'll check if
| we have local models and hardware that can run them nicely, by
| then.
|
| Hats off to the folks who have decided to deal with the nascent
| versions though.
| nosianu wrote:
| I have a modified tiered approach, that I adopted without
| consciously thinking hard about it.
|
| I use AI mostly for problems on my fringes. Things like
| manipulating some Excel table somebody sent me with invoice
| data from one of our suppliers and some moderately complex
| question that they (pure business) don't know how to handle,
| where simple formulas would not be sufficient and I would
| have to start learning Power Query. I can tell the AI exactly
| what I want in human language and don't have to learn a
| system that I only use because people here use it to fill
| holes not yet served by "real" software (databases, automated
| EDI data exchange, and code that automates the business
| processes). It works great, and it saves me hours on fringe
| tasks that people outsource to me, but that I too don't
| really want to deal with too much.
|
| For example, I also don't check various vendors and models
| against one another. I still stick to whatever the default is
| from the first vendor I signed up with, and so far it worked
| well enough. If I were to spend time checking vendors and
| models, the knowledge would be outdated far too quickly for
| my taste.
|
| On the other hand, I don't use it for my core tasks yet. Too
| much movement in this space, I would have to invest many
| hours in how to integrate this new stuff when the "old"
| software approach is more than sufficient, still more
| reliable, and _vastly_ more economical (once implemented).
|
| Same for coding. I ask AI on the fringes where I don't know
| enough, but in the core that I'm sufficiently proficient with
| I wait for a more stable AI world.
|
| I don't solve complex sciency problems, I move business data
| around. Many suppliers, many customers, different countries,
| various EDI formats, everybody has slightly different data
| and naming and procedures. For example, I have to deal with
| one vendor wanting some share of pre-payment early in the
| year, which I have to apply to thousands of invoices over the
| year and track when we have to pay a number of hundreds or
| thousands of invoices all with different payment conditions
| and timings. If I were to ask the AI I would have to be so
| super specific I may as well write the code.
|
| But I love AI on the not-yet-automated edges. I'm starting to
| show others how they can ask some AI, and many are surprised
| how easy it is - when you have thee right task and know
| exactly hat you have and what you want. My last colleague-
| convert was someone already past retirement age (still
| working on the business side). I think this is a good time to
| gradually teach regular employees some small use cases to get
| them interested, rather than some big top-down approach that
| mostly creates more work and many people then rightly
| question what the point is.
|
| About politically-touched questions like whether I should
| rather use an EU-made AI like the one this topic is about, or
| use one from the already much of the software-world
| dominating US vendor, I don't care at this point, because I'm
| not yet creating any significant dependencies. I am glad to
| see it happening though (as an EU country citizen).
| bee_rider wrote:
| > About politically-touched questions like whether I should
| rather use an EU-made AI like the one this topic is about,
| or use one from the already much of the software-world
| dominating US vendor, I don't care at this point, because
| I'm not yet creating any significant dependencies. I am
| glad to see it happening though (as an EU country citizen).
|
| Another nice thing about waiting a bit--one can see how
| much (if any) the EU models get from paying the "do things
| somewhat ethically" price. I suspect it won't be much of a
| penalty.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Depending on the definition of "nicely", FWIW I currently run
| Ollama sever [1] + Qwen Coder models [2] with decent success
| compared to the big hosted models. Granted, I don't utilize
| most "agentic" features and still mostly use chat-based
| interactions.
|
| The server is basically just my Windows gaming PC, and the
| client is my editor on a macOS laptop.
|
| Most of this effort is so that I can prepare for the arrival
| of that mythical second half of 2026!
|
| [1] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/faq.md#ho
| w-d...
|
| [2] https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-coder-66ea
| a22...
| QRY wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your setup! I'm also very interested in
| running AI locally. In which contexts are you experiencing
| decent success? eg debugging, boilerplate, or some other
| task?
| bogzz wrote:
| I'm running qwen via ollama on my M4 Max 14 inch with the
| OpenWebUI interface, it's silly easy to set up.
|
| Not useful though, I just like the idea of having so much
| compressed knowledge on my machine in just 20gb. In fact
| I disabled all Siri features cause they're dogshit.
| Kostic wrote:
| Agentic editing is really nice. If on VSCode, Cline works
| well with Ollama.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| It is completely unreasonable to buy the hardware to run a
| local model and only use it 1% of the time. It will be
| unreasonable in 2026 and probably very long after that.
|
| Maybe s.th. like a collective that buys the gpu's together
| and then uses them without leaking data can work.
| Uehreka wrote:
| When ChatGPT, then Llama, then Alpaca came out in rapid
| succession, I decided to hold off a year before diving in.
| This was definitely the right choice at the time, it's
| becoming less-the-right-choice all the time.
|
| In particular it's important to get past the whole need-to-
| self-host thing. Like, I used to be holding out for when this
| stuff would plateau, but that keeps not happening, and the
| things we're starting to be able to build in 2025 now that we
| have fairly capable models like Claude 4 are super exciting.
|
| If you just want locally runnable commodity "boring
| technology that just works" stuff, sure, cool, keep waiting.
| If you're interested in hacking on interesting new technology
| (glances at the title of the site) now is an excellent time
| to do so.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Not to invalidate your feelings of fatigue, but I'm sure glad
| that there are a lot of choices in the marketplace, and that
| they are innovating at a decent clip. If you're committed to
| always be using the best of all options you're in for a wild
| ride, but it beats stagnation and monopoly.
| ivape wrote:
| We're also headed into a world where there will be very few
| open weight models coming out (Meta going closed source, not
| releasing Behemoth). This era of constant model releases may
| be over before it even started. Gratitude definitely needs to
| be echoed.
| echelon wrote:
| If China stays open, then the rest of the world will build
| on open. I'm frankly shocked that a domestic player isn't
| doing this.
|
| Fine tuning will work for niche business use cases better
| than promises of AGI.
| seszett wrote:
| > _If China stays open, then the rest of the world will
| build on open_
|
| I was listening to a Taiwanese news channel earlier today
| and although I wasn't paying much attention, I remember
| hearing about how Chinese AIs are biased towards Chinese
| political ideas and that some programme to create a more
| Taiwanese-aligned AI was being put in place.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if just for this reason, at least
| a few different open models kept being released, because
| even if they don't directly bring in money, several
| actors care more about spreading or defending their ideas
| and IAs are perfect for that.
| kakapo5672 wrote:
| It's curious that China is carrying the open banner
| nowadays. Why is that?
|
| One theory is that they believe the real endpoint value
| will be embodied AIs (i.e. robots), where they think
| they'll hold a long-term competitive advantage. The
| models themselves will become commoditized, under the
| pressure of the open-source models.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I don't agree with that. I didn't expect we ever get open
| weight models close to the current state of the art, yet
| china delivered some real burners.
| sunaookami wrote:
| You only need Claude and GPT. Everything else is not worth your
| time.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| An alternative: don't use LLMs. Focus on the enjoyment of
| coding, not on becoming more efficient. Because the lion's
| share of the gains from increased efficiency are mainly going
| to the CEOs.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| This is HN, we are not all wage workers here
|
| For wage workers, not learning the latest productivity tools
| will result in job loss. By the time it is expected of your
| role, if you have not learned already, you won't be given the
| leniency to catch up on company time. There is no impactful
| resistance to this through individual protest, only by
| organizing your peers in industry
| freedomben wrote:
| This might be good short term advice, but in the medium and
| long term I think devs who don't use any AI will start to be
| much slower at delivery than devs who do. I'm alreay seeing
| it IRL (and I'm not a fan of AI coding, so this sucks for me)
| ivape wrote:
| Slower in initial delivery maybe, but the maintenance and
| debugging of production applications requires intimate
| knowledge of the code base usually. The amount of code AI
| writes will require AI itself to manage it since no human
| would inundate themselves with that much code. Will it be
| faster even so? We simply won't know because those vibe
| coded apps have just entered production. The horror stories
| can't be written yet because the horror is ongoing.
|
| I'm big on AI, but vibe coding is such a fuck around and
| find out situation.
| jdiff wrote:
| Plenty of small FAFO stories circulate already. There
| will certainly be more. Lots of demonstration code out
| there in the training data meant only for illustrative
| purposes, and all too often vibe coding overlooks the
| rock bottom basics of security.
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh yeah, I totally agree. Vibe coding is not (anytime
| soon at least) going to be a thing.
|
| But using AI tools for things like completing simple
| functions (co-pilot) or asking questions about a codebase
| can still be huge time savers. I've also had really good
| success with having AI generate me basic scripts that
| would have taken 45 minutes of work, but it gets me a
| working script in 3. It's not the revolution that's been
| promised, but it definitely makes me faster even though I
| don't like it
| jdiff wrote:
| Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out
| by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't
| there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre
| of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it
| doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming.
| The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the
| decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.
| sva_ wrote:
| All the competition is great to me. I'm using premium models
| all the time and barely spent a few euro on them, as there's
| always some offers that are almost free if you look around.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Much like with new computer hardware, announcements are
| constant but they rarely entice me to drop one thing and switch
| to another. If an average user picked a top 3 option last year
| and stuck with them through now you didn't really miss out on
| all that much, even if your particular choice wasn't the
| absolute latest and greatest the entire time.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Sticking with one year old models would mean no o3 which is a
| huge loss for dev work
| htrp wrote:
| is anyone doing online reviews of model performance ? (I know
| artificial analysis does some work on infrastructure and has an
| intelligence index)
| reckless wrote:
| The aggregate picture only tells you so much.
|
| Sites like simonwillison.net/2025/jul/ and channels like
| https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official also cover new
| model releases pretty quickly for some "out of the box
| thinking/reasoning" evaluations.
|
| For me and my usage I can really only tell if I start using the
| new model for tasks I actually use them for.
|
| My personal benchmark andrew.ginns.uk/merbench has full code
| and data on GitHub if you want a staring point!
| Eupolemos wrote:
| Yeah, GosuCoder is interesting.
|
| https://youtu.be/064VC2gFIGY?si=l0LVtUttVrbiBZ3K
| behnamoh wrote:
| At this point, the entire AI industry seems to just copy OpenAI
| for the most part. I cannot help but notice that we have the same
| services just offered by different companies. The amount of
| innovation in this build is not that high actually.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That's what a healthy competition in the free market looks
| like. Things like Apple that "stay innovative" for decades are
| aberration caused by monopolistic gatekeeping.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > Things like Apple are aberration.
|
| This used to be a good example of innovation that is hard to
| copy. But it doesn't apply anymore for two reasons:
|
| 1. Apple went from being an agile, pro-developers, creative
| company to an Oracle-style old-board milking-cow company; not
| much innovation is happening at Apple anymore.
|
| 2. To their surprise, much of what they call "innovative" is
| actually pretty easy to replicate on other platforms. It took
| 4 hours for Flutter folks to re-create Liquid Glass...
| overfeed wrote:
| > This used to be a good example of innovation that is hard
| to copy.
|
| Steve Jobs did say they "patented the hell out of [the
| iPhone]" and went about saber-rattling, then came the
| patent wars which proved that Apple also rely on innovation
| by others, and that patent workarounds would still result
| in competitive products, and things calmed down afterwards.
| croes wrote:
| They often copied others but because Apple is more popular
| they got the fame for ,,their" innovation.
| klntsky wrote:
| They are not the same service. There is A LOT of difference
| between offerings if you actually use the models for daily
| tasks like coding.
| lossolo wrote:
| It really depends on what you're working on and what was
| included in the training data of the model you used. From a
| model architecture point of view, they're basically all the
| same, the main difference lies in the training data.
| croes wrote:
| It's basically everywhere the same technology. Maybe a
| difference in training data and computing power.
| cubefox wrote:
| > At this point, the entire AI industry seems to just copy
| OpenAI for the most part
|
| Well, OpenAI copied the Deep Research feature from Google. They
| even used the same name (as does Mistral).
| cowpig wrote:
| Weird that you're being downvoted for stating a fact.
|
| All of the major labs are innovating and copying one another.
|
| Anthropic has all of the other labs trying to come up with an
| "agentic" protocol of their own. They also seem to be way
| ahead on interpretability research
|
| Deepseek came up with multi-headed latent attention, and
| publishing an open-source model that's huge and SOTA.
|
| Deepmind's way ahead on world models
|
| ...
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Whole world is now building stuff on top of `f(input: string):
| string` function - they're going to be similar.
| Aissen wrote:
| The Voxtral release seemed interesting, because it brought back
| competitive open source audio transcription. I wonder if it was
| necessary to have an LLM backbone (vs a pure-function model)
| though, but the approach is interesting.
| nomad_horse wrote:
| > brought back competitive open source audio transcription
|
| Bear in mind that there are a lot of very strong _open_ STT
| models that Mistral's press-release didn't bother to compare
| to, making impression they are the best new open thing since
| Whisper. Here is an open benchmark:
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard .
| The strongest model Mistral compared to is Scribe, ranked 10
| here.
|
| This benchmark is for English, but many of those models are
| multilingual (eg https://huggingface.co/nvidia/canary-1b-flash
| )
| espadrine wrote:
| The best model there is 2.5B parameters. I can believe that a
| model 10x bigger is somewhat better.
|
| One element of comparison is OpenAI Whisper v3, which
| achieves 7.44 WER on the ASR leaderboard, and shows up as
| ~8.3 WER on FLEURS in the Voxtral announcement[0]. If FLEURS
| has +1 WER on average compared to ASR, it would imply that
| Voxtral does have a lead on ASR.
|
| [0]: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral
| nomad_horse wrote:
| There are larger models in there, a 8B and a 6B. By this
| logic they should be above 2B model, yet we don't see this.
| That's why we have open standard benchmarks, to measure
| this directly - not hypothesize by the models' sizes or do
| some cross-dataset arithmetics.
|
| Also note that, Voxtral's capacity is not necessarily all
| devoted to speech, since it "Retains the text understanding
| capabilities of its language model backbone"
| jiehong wrote:
| I just can't find dictation apps for Mac using those models
| except for open whisper.
|
| IBM's granite models seems multilingual and well ranked, but
| can't find any app using it.
|
| Anybody aware of a dictation app using one of those "better"
| models?
| M4v3R wrote:
| I think they've buried the lede with their image editing
| capabilities, which seem to be very good! OpenAI's model will
| change the whole image while editing messing up details in
| unrelated areas. This seems to perfectly preserve parts of the
| image unrelated to your query and selectively apply the edits,
| which is very impressive! The only downside is the output
| resolution (the resulting image is 1184px wide even though the
| input image was much larger).
|
| For a quick test I've uploaded a photo of my home office and
| asked the following prompt: "Retouch this photo to fix the gray
| panels at the bottom that are slightly ripped, make them look
| brand new"
|
| Input image (rescaled): https://i.imgur.com/t0WCKAu.jpeg
|
| Output image: https://i.imgur.com/xb99lmC.png
|
| I think it did a fantastic job. The output image quality is ever
| so slightly worse than the original but that's something they'll
| improve with time I'm sure.
| sync wrote:
| FYI, your Input and output URLs are the same (I thought I was
| crazy for a sec trying to spot the differences)
| M4v3R wrote:
| whoops, sorry about that, fixed
| pablonaj wrote:
| They are using Flux Kontext from Black Forest Labs, fantastic
| model.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| So Mistral is just hosting a Flux model?
| Squarex wrote:
| Yes, but it's great that they are both made by european
| companies.
| bakkoting wrote:
| Kontext is probably better at this specific task, if that's
| what Mistral is using. Certainly faster and cheaper. But:
|
| OpenAI just yesterday added the ability to do higher fidelity
| image edits with their model [1], though I'm not sure if the
| functionality is only in the API or if their chat UI will make
| use of this feature too. Same prompt and input image: [2]
|
| [1] https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1945538534884135132
|
| [2] https://i.imgur.com/w5Q0UQm.png
| joshcartme wrote:
| Wow, that really is amazing!
|
| I couldn't help but notice that you can still see the shadows
| of the rips in the fixed version. I wonder how hard it would be
| to get those fixed as well.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| It messed up the titles of the books.
| Lerc wrote:
| That might be autoencoder loss rather than the image
| generation itself. It's hard to tell without doing a round-
| trip using just the autoencoder without any generation, but
| it kind-of has the look of that sort of loss.
| BrunoWinck wrote:
| I need that,
| BrunoWinck wrote:
| I needed that. Now I have it :)
| bangaladore wrote:
| If you haven't tried OpenAI's deep research feature, you are
| missing out. I'm not sure of any good alternatives, I've tried
| Google's, and I'm not impressed.
|
| There is a lot of value to say engineers doing tradeoff studies
| using these tools as a huge head start.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Try one from Kimi 2 as well. I was surprised how good it turned
| out to be.
| crmd wrote:
| It's been invaluable to me for market research related to
| starting a business. It's like having a bright early career new
| hire research assistant/product manager "on staff" to
| collaborate with.
| criemen wrote:
| Perplexities isn't bad? Although I lack the OpenAI subscription
| to compare.
| freedomben wrote:
| I've gotten pretty different results from OpenAI and Gemini,
| though it's hard to say one is better/worse than the other.
| Just different
| ripley12 wrote:
| Anthropic's Research is pretty good; I'd say on par with
| OpenAI.
|
| Agreed about Google, accuracy is a little better on the paid
| version but the reports are still frustrating to read through.
| They're incredibly verbose, like an undergrad padding a report
| to get to a certain word count.
| the_duke wrote:
| That's Gemini Pro now in general. The initial preview was
| pretty good, but the newer iterations are incredibly verbose.
|
| "Be terse" is a mandatory part of the prompt now.
|
| Either it's to increase token counts so they can charge more,
| or to show better usage growth metrics internally or for
| shareholders, or just some odd effects of fine tuning /
| system prompt ... who knows.
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| Back in my day, La Chat was a rapper, not a wrapper.
| dust42 wrote:
| Actually Le Chat is french for the (male) cat. Also 'Le Chat'
| is a well known laundry detergent (of german origin - Henkel
| company). The headline 'Le Chat takes a deep dive' means 'the
| cat takes a deep dive'. As there is a cooperation with (german)
| Black Forest Labs, this is all pretty funny for a french
| speaking person. 'La Chatte' is the female cat. And also
| colloquial for female private parts.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I have been a heavy user of ChatGPT. I guess I should try out
| LeChat. What can I expect? Are they basically the same tool with
| slight differences?
| trilogic wrote:
| Finally EU is waking up. Proud of it. I am switching asap my
| Openai contract finishes to Mistral. We got to support EU, Viva
| La France.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Is Voice available on the free tier? I signed up just to try it,
| but all I see is the dictation mode.
| maelito wrote:
| Can we expect Voxtral in the Futo Android keyboard ?
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