villish

Have you tested older Gemini models? I wonder if their anti-distillation security measures are silently downgrading you to a less capable model.

> Spitballing random pr pieces from companies about to IPO is not helpful to anyone, fyi.

You can just use logic to come to the same conclusion. The Chinese labs have a fraction of compute and data. The simplest explanation is distillation.

Muse is significantly faster and more token efficient. That is pretty impressive considering how much larger it is. There is a lot of potential even though this release won't shake up the standings.

China blocks ChatGPT. Which is “banning the competition” that the above posters were claiming the US would do.

As far as I’m aware, only China does this currently.

You should not trust any LLM to give you accurate legal advice. I can’t imagine all the ways that could go wrong.

They are more focused on incorporating AI into their products, for better or for worse, but they could burn a whole lot of compute to train a model that competes for the #1 spot. Is that worth it to say you’re the (temporary) leader in AI? I doubt it.

Do you use Mistral's models to help improve the European offering?

Otherwise if you don't care about your data being used in training you might as well use the best, which is the US models on a subscription plan. If you do care, use downloadable weight models served by reputable providers, or selfhost.

Potentially higher cache hit rate at the expense of your data being kept for training.

The European labs are distinctly disadvantaged. US labs scraped the entire internet and downloaded copyrighted works to train their models and just paid a fine. They get 99% of all investment money in AI because of the lead they hold. Chinese labs also scrape the internet, download copyrighted works, and launch massive distillation campaigns using stolen accounts and credit cards. They get full support and funding from the PRC.

Europe gets barely any funding because it is so far behind and cannot use the illegal strategies Chinese labs use to distill Opus/Astra. Mistral cannot compete because the competition is literally breaking every law.

> What's your point again

I said it in my original comment. That is the moat. The reason frontier AI is a two horse race. European labs cannot gain ground because the only way to do it is illegally.

> Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up

Probably. But if OpenAI or Anthropic stole your credit card to purchase tokens you could sue them. You won't get a cent from any Chinese labs.

> it’s nice to see some actual competition again.

Competition benefits everyone. But this isn't fair competition. A German startup cannot legally do any of these tactics required to bypass Anthropic/OAI's counter-measures. Which makes EU less competitive and therefore less investment in European AI.

Yes but Claude is filtered by the Great Firewall. Anthropic also restricts Chinese access. Their security measures aren't bulletproof but they do catch a substantial amount of those accounts and ban them. That's why PRC labs that distill from Claude need thousands.

The workarounds used to bypass Anthropic's security measures are quite illegal. They use stolen credit cards, API keys, and accounts. That is only possible in China because any other US/EU lab doing the same would get into massive legal trouble.

That's the moat. Mistral has the capability but not the legal protections.

The 3 US models have their own style.

Qwen3.8 is very clearly distilled from Claude models.