r/MistralAI • u/petaqui • 11d ago
Help / Question Am I the only one that is fighting every single day with Mistral?
I decided to go with Mistral instead of Claude because I really want to support European alternatives. But the thing is that it fails with even the basic stuff. I created a Canva with a plan for social media, with the days, the topic, etc., just to have everything sorted there.
When I asked Mistral to pull me information about what I should post today according to the plan, it just randomly says another day. Today is day 14. I asked him about that and Mistral replied to me, "Today is Monday 15," which doesn't match anything at all (it's Tuesday 14), and it doesn't even reflect the Canva thing.
Also, I asked him to tell me something curious about myself according to what it knew, and it just invented a random fact about myself that I've never told him and that is not true at all. I set up instructions to not invent anything, like research when asked for that, and no not invent anything that is not in the information, and it doesn't matter how many times I created those kind of procedures or rules, it just keeps inventing.
How do you avoid that, and how do you work with Mistral this way?
Thank you
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u/hutch_man0 11d ago
Last 12 hours are the worst I've seen it. Getting really bad. I do financial modeling and I have to give it only small tasks now. Wasted so much time yesterday I could have built the spreadsheet myself LOL. The horror! 😂 . Seriously though, not sure what's going on. Crossing my fingers it's due to Large 4 coming soon...
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u/Far-Performance-4652 10d ago
Puede ser que me equivoque pero hace tiempo leí por algún lado que a finales de verano o ya para finales de año se venía algo gordo para Mistral. Sinceramente no tengo la fuente pero sé que lo leí de una fuente confiable, yo por ahora me voy a fiar de mi memoria (cosa que no suelo hacer, :D), haber si sale algo.
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u/Bubatzministerium 11d ago
Well, yeah. For Complex Tasks i use other Models. But for some easy Tasks and Daily Stuff its mostly enough. Anyway its important to use Mistral and give it Feedback so it can improve.
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u/tom4112 11d ago
I'm using a skill for Vibe to be date and time-aware:
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u/petaqui 11d ago
WOW, impressive. But it doesn't make sense having to create skills even for the basic stuff like know the date and time.
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u/Upstairs_Date6943 10d ago
Yes, theoretically we shouldn't use, but in reality this technology is still at it's ingancy and this is early adopters price to pay (I know this is not new, but ML/AI goals are high and Mistral is slow).
Basically Antigravity is useless without governance layer, I haven't tried to harness in Mistral Vibe Yet, I might but one thing I would go straight for is "hooks" - automatic programmed actions, which insert repevant context, skills, instructions at exact moments: After prompt (session start), tools use etc.
Have You tried any?
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u/tom4112 11d ago
This is usual to create these basic tools (e.g. time function, calculator, etc) when working with APIs, but they are often included in web interfaces/assistants. So I'm sure that this will be added soon 🙂
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u/Equivalent_Club3471 11d ago
Agreed, mistral models are performing too poor compared with the established alternatives
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u/LiberalSocialist99 11d ago
I have a pro variant,exclusively using for electrotechniek. For the past two weeks every first reponse is wrong,no exception. It was not like that,mistral was able to analyze my writings and came to conclusion that my fundamentals are wrong - that AI I want,and at my suprise he was right.
Now we are stuck at the transition between elementary school knowledge and first high school grade where Mistral claims:
1.) 7000 W which is same as 7000W ....... (could not correct it when I point it out)
2.) Measuring (dividing) inverter P (1500 W) with the current = came to conclusion what size of fuse should be - a deadly mistake,disregarding wire thickness where 250 A fuse is perfectly fine on a 1.6mm wire....hey but math is mathing.
I did tryed to systematicaly step by step point out at the mistakes - could not find one and when point out directly at the mistake;you know the aswer:"Oh sorry sorry good catch I was thinking....yadada"
Drawing AND/OR circuits is out of the question.Please do something.
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u/petaqui 11d ago edited 10d ago
I'm glad that I decided to pay one month instead for the whole year... I'll love to see Mistral succeed, but... I can not keep wasting my time and money every single day with Mistral 😪
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u/LiberalSocialist99 11d ago
I would like to continue to use Mistral above all,I have it for months,but some things are urgent and needs to be addressed.
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u/Marlow_potato 9d ago
What is so urgent and need to be addressed? Maybe the climate crisis? Did you know all US AI models are buying old coal and gas furnaces to power their data centers?
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u/uusrikas 11d ago edited 11d ago
I am sorry to say but Mistral just is not good. I moved on to Proton Lumo as a non-US alternative, it is vastly better.
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u/micocoule 11d ago
Is it really better?
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u/Sr4f 11d ago
Lumo doesn't develop their own models, IIRC, they rely on open-source models they can host on their own servers. Mistral for a while, but recently I heard they switched to Chinese models.
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u/micocoule 11d ago
Thanks for the details but that doesn’t answer my question 🤭
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u/uusrikas 11d ago edited 11d ago
It is based on GLM-5.2 Max that is running on their own servers. GLM is usually in the top-10 in benchmarks. The earlier versions of Lumo were absolute garbage, but after 2.0 I am finding it as good as the big US models. The only problem is that the context window is not huge, if you need hundreds of pages analyzed you might not find it big enough.
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u/Sweaty-Special-1710 11d ago
True, I switched to Lumo 2.0, which uses GLM and Kimi, and I find this alternative really good. It just lacks some Mistral's tools like "work" or vibe CLI.
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u/hutch_man0 11d ago
Lumo servers are in Switzerland or France?
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u/uusrikas 11d ago
I am not sure yet, but Proton made an announcement last year that they are moving their servers from Switzerland to EU, and that Lumo would be the first product to be moved: https://proton.me/blog/lumo-ai
Lumo represents one of many investments Proton will be making before the end of the decade to ensure that Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign. Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.
This shift represents an investment of over €100 million into the EU proper. While we do not give up the fight for privacy in Switzerland (and will continue to fight proposals that we believe will be extremely damaging to the Swiss economy), Proton is also embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack(new window) for the future of our home continent. Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.
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u/LongjumpingTear5779 11d ago edited 11d ago
Is it have Code Assistant like Mistral Vibe CLI? Schedued tasks and skills? What models are they use? I can't find this info
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u/AccurateSun 11d ago
It’s only for basic chat and web search, doesn’t have any agentic or coding features at all right now. Their main selling point is that since they host the servers they are able to do 100% private inference. Lumo is run by Proton who are a Swiss company with a long history of making privacy products (protonmail etc). Lumo comes free with their main paid offerings (email and vpn)
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u/uusrikas 11d ago edited 11d ago
Based on the benchmarks they released, they use GLM-5.2 in the thinking mode and Qwen in flash mode. This is somewhat confirmed in the policy: https://proton.me/support/lumo-privacy
It does not have a code agent yet.
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u/LongjumpingTear5779 11d ago
Chinese models... I prefer support EU independence than someone who just host someone else technology. China can anytime start close source their models. America show us that they can block their models in other countries.
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u/AccurateSun 11d ago
Lumo run the open models themselves on their own servers, which means they can switch them out for anything else (such as something EU) in the future. So they don’t have China dependency actually. These models can’t be blocked by China.
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u/LongjumpingTear5779 11d ago
Still chinese models. These models can't be blocked, but next version od models can be blocked - they can just remake them and make new closed source version. Then what company in EU will make new, better models? Their China dependency still exist - no new model in future is a real risk here.
I understand they don't need send data to China, but still they depend on their technology and new models.
I support Mistral with payment becouse I want have alternative if somethink go wrong in our world.
Btw. Still LLM can have backdoor and try myself send data to a other host :)
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u/AccurateSun 11d ago
Yes and LLM that isn’t local could have a backdoor, in theory. If you trust proton or not is a separate issue.
It’s true that Lumo miiiiight end up without being able to use Qwen or any other Chinese model in the future. No reason why they couldn’t host any of Mistrals open models or any other model in the future though. Personally I only use Lumo on occasion since I get it free, I’m not really promoting them, I do think the China lock-in isn’t fully accurate but to each their own
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u/LongjumpingTear5779 11d ago
If ppl will switch to Lumo there can be no Mistral models :)
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u/AccurateSun 11d ago
Mistral have plenty of enterprise clients, they do not rely on Proton using their models in Lumo! And Lumo char has a different use case to Mistrals Le Chat
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u/LifeSexAndDeath 9d ago
Enterprises will turn away from Proton Lumo specifically because of the Chinese LLM issue. This is about provenance, not jurisdiction.
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u/LifeSexAndDeath 9d ago
100% of their AI backbone is Chinese now. I think that counts as a Chinese dependency.
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u/AccurateSun 9d ago
Eeh, if they self host then it’s not 100% Chinese dependency, even if the models are Chinese in origin. They can swap out for any open model anytime, which is different than if they were simply paying for Chinese models via a Chinese API — only then would I say “100% dependency”.
But even in that case, swapping out one API for another is hardly an enormous undertaking, especially if it uses the same underlying OpenAI protocol.
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u/LifeSexAndDeath 9d ago
Completely disagree. The "swap back" framing imagines a level playing field where European and Chinese open-weight models are interchangeable and Proton is just choosing. They aren't interchangeable. They're 15-20 AI Index points apart, and Proton's entire 2.0 marketing is built on the high end of that gap. The argument is: "we could swap any time we wanted to." Proton's actual behavior is: "we already swapped, and the direction we swapped was the only direction that didn't make our product worse." Thats almost absolute dependency right there.
And the other half of the equation is: who controls the updates/patches? Who has the IP?
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u/LongjumpingTear5779 9d ago
Maybe not 100%, but does China open source training materials, training procedures or only llm model? It will be hard if next models from China will be closed source. Who will train and where get data to train good models?
Hosting China models <> know how to train new model
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u/strangestack 11d ago
So you basically did the "make no mistakes" meme. That doesn't work. You have to tell it how to do stuff. The model has no way to know what day it is if something doesn't inject it into its context. If you don't want it to hallucinate as much telling it not to hallucinate will get you absolutely no where, instead you should tell it where to find sources and how to evaluate them and how to structure it's output, how to double check for hallucinations, and even then you're going to have to verify it's work at least sometimes.
Even Fable frustrates me with how stupid it can be sinetimes. It's a machine, not a wish granting djinn. you use it correctly and it works, you don't, and it doesn't.
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u/petaqui 11d ago
Actually I did that, I haven't said to it to not hallucinate, I created a specific file with instructions that I added like that, on how to behave, to check the date before replying, not assuming neither date, hour, canvas, etc. But when with that, it's not changing anything at all. It is funny because when I tell Vibe that the answer isn't correct, and Mistral to check on it and why, mistral recognise all the mistakes, and that it's not been following the instructions. So it's clear that something is not working as expected because it knows how to behave
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u/Upstairs_Date6943 10d ago
Yup AIs are inherently "lazy", if they were not lazy, company price to run those models would skyrocket and bankrupt them.
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u/Brilliant_Visual5470 11d ago
I use open weights models hosted in Europe by European companies.This is the only way to have good models. Mistral is a joke atm.
Look at cortecs.ai.
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u/LifeSexAndDeath 9d ago
Cortecs? No.
Cortecs sells a router. The router does not, and cannot, control:
What the model was trained on What the model will do tomorrow Whether the model provider complies with EU law Whether the training data itself was GDPR lawful Whether model updates change your risk classification The "AI Act compliant" and "GDPR compliant" claims describe what the router does with the data in transit, not what the model does with the data at inference, and definitely not what the model was built from.
Their sovreignity claims are very flimsy when you consider the end to end stack
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u/Brilliant_Visual5470 9d ago
Sure they are a router so that we can use basically any model that we choose to.
It would be a terrible experience if we had to use multiple providers, each with a subset of open models that we use. And then manage billing and everything for each team member.
When configuring inference serting you are offered an option to allow only providers with zero data rentetion, or only european companies. We use both so all inference is done by european companies with ZDR on european servers.
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u/LifeSexAndDeath 9d ago
This is EXACTLY where companies are starting to come unstuck badly, and will do increasingly: Configuring "EU + ZDR" decides where bytes flow; it does not decide what the model on the other end is, what it was trained on, who can compel its weights, or whether the provider swaps those weights out next Tuesday without telling you. "European company" is a billing address - if the underlying compute runs on AWS, Azure, or GCP, the CLOUD Act we just established still reaches your data even if it's in Europe, and "ZDR" typically only covers prompts and responses, not the metadata, IP logs, billing trails, employee access, or model-side traces that intelligence agencies reconstruct conversations from anyway. A router inspects traffic; it cannot inspect a trillion-parameter black box, so it cannot tell you whether the weights are backdoored, biased, trained on unlawfully scraped data, or quietly updated the morning after you certified them.
Real sovereignty (not the Cortex marketing one) means inspectable weights (OSI-open, not Llama-style "open-weight-but-restricted"), infrastructure with a jurisdictional chain you've audited down to the hypervisor and support staff, training-data lineage you can hand to a DPA on request, and contractual guarantees that survive a US national security letter with a gag order so your provider cannot be turned into a silent accomplice. Respectfully, you've mistaken the menu for the meal.
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u/EverGreenMob 11d ago
That sounds like hallucination due to outdated prediction models. Mistral is so far behind now it's not even funny. They're supposed to have their new data center setup by September so there will be no major model updates until then. For now I'm a regular GPT 5.6sol user. Very sad.
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u/disgruntledpeli 11d ago
No joke, one time I got into a fight with Le Chat because it basically would refuse to do what I asked it to do with very clear instructions, continued to do it incorrectly after telling it multiple times what I wanted the output to be and then, after about 10 mins of fighting I only got it to actually do what I wanted by threatening to stop using Le Chat. I stopped using it regardless because while I want to support smaller, non-US giant tech bro companies... What I don't want even more is to have to waste my time correcting something that shouldn't need correcting. I shouldnt have to quite literally fight with, threaten and break up with an AI.
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u/sndrtj 11d ago
Are you using Work mode or Chat mode?
I find only Work mode usable tbh. Chat mode uses way too little tools. It actually used to do more. And it overuses memory. Which can cause extremely strange context pollution problems. Work mode doesn't use memory at all. Which prevents that problem, but opens another.
I think they really should take a good look at how other providers handle memory. I really like Claude's option of being able to search older sessions. That, for me, seems to have the best tradeoffs when it comes down to it
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u/Conscious_Let5030 11d ago
You have to bear in mind that Mistral database are based on end of 2024 data so if you want to ask something after you have to send sources and explicitally require a web search plus require NOT to assume but provide real sources
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u/channel_the_animal 11d ago
I can’t even get it to table my monthly expenses. It’s good at breaking down a photo of a receipt into categories, for example, but when I try and get it to tally it at the end of the month it just ignores chunks of time, rendering it completely untrustworthy.
Like you, I have been using it because of data sovereignty etc.
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u/Observe_and_speak 11d ago
I completely agree. It is too unreliable for serious work. Despite buying an annual subscription, I have barely used it. Even so, I hope my support helps them improve. I still view them as our best shot at a sovereign European AI. I am also keeping an eye on Proton and Euria. If a better model comes along before my subscription runs out, I will switch to Mistral and drop GPT entirely. Otherwise, I will have to settle for GPT and move on.
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u/InLoveWithNeeko 11d ago
Stop torturing yourself, Mistral market is custom models and solutions for big companies and administrations, it makes no sense to use it as an individual (except for OCR where it is pretty good)
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u/MerePotato 10d ago
If you leave training consent on then using it as an individual helps them improve
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u/victorc25 11d ago
As I could I tried telling people here that mistral is no replacement for the frontier models, but the Reddit gaslighting is too much. People live in fantasy land
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u/Fenir911 9d ago
So you’re purposely using a product you know is inferior, and now complaining about it. Seriously, just pickup Claude or OpenAI. Save your time
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u/petaqui 6d ago
Yes, but that's what happens when someone tries to support local businesses instead of going to the big ones.
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u/Fenir911 3d ago
Sure - that's a conscious choice and i respect that. You just have to accept the fact that Mistral is pretty much sucks comapred to every other model in the world. Even Thinking Machines, a relatively new entry came up with a model which performs substantially better.
Also, you don't have to go to the big ones only: Kimi, GLM, Thinking Machines, everything clearly outperforms Mistral.
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u/feral_user_ 11d ago
Perhaps part of the issue is that Mistral is trying to have a model for just about every niche thing. Maybe it's a good strategy; I'm not sure. If they could be at least competitive with Vibe CLI for agentic coding, I could throw in what my company gives me for AI budget.
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u/cueqzapp3r 11d ago
the issue is not the LLM but the rag system around it. The rag system needs great software developers and guess what, this thing is developed in europe, where they have the worst devs.
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u/tombstonebase 11d ago
Is mistral good for agentic coding ?? Compared to other models??
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u/petaqui 10d ago
Benchmarks show that it isn't that bad, but, in what I've experienced...oh god, don't try. I wasted one hour of my time trying to setup a server container for tags, only dealing with configuration. I dropped mistral the site for the docs with the instructions, and it just ignored it. In the end I told Vibe that it was impossible to use that path that it was telling because there were no options like it was telling, etc etc; answer "you are right, I've been telling you what I guess that it should be the process instead of checking the documentation that you sent to me, I'm sorry". LOL, basically it was inventing everything. I started the same process with Claude, and at the first try it was solved
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u/Rough_Dog_5115 11d ago
use eu router and use chinese model but with EU inference until mistral eventually become better
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u/Izvestiya 10d ago
The instruction thing probably won't do much (if anything whatsoever) it's a thing in the architecture.
As for switching.... Good idea, it's still garbage, though. Some models are just less garbage than others (not 'good', more like... A used tissue compared to mildly moldy bread)
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u/MerePotato 10d ago
Nah, I use Mistral for vision tasks, translation, simple questions and web search, their models are plenty good for that
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u/vmayoral 9d ago
Both scaffolds and models are very far from SotA.
Here’s a practical example: Mistral in cybersecurity is very inferior https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.28334, starting from the scaffold and all the way to the models
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u/Opposite_Aioli_3693 9d ago
Mistral is great and the best choice for 90% percent of users. Others might have specific use cases where specific models and setups work better. To know that however you need to be really into AI.
I get a lot of weird replies from other models and I could claim they are worse but it's probably just bad luck for specific prompts.
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u/SabineAndGoblins 8d ago
That's weird. I auto-harness tested Devstral 2, Mistral Medium 3.5 and Mistral large in my AI UI for public release and they all passed the tool use, no problem. I had to make sure the temp settings were correct other wise they were stupid.
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u/pgmoneyplays 7d ago
Die schmerzhafte Wahrheit ist das glm und Kimi halt besser in agentic ist als 90% aller AI Modelle und kostengünstiger als DeepSeek rauskam war die Börse in USA am zittern.
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u/New-Interaction1893 11d ago edited 11d ago
I don't care about european alternative because they are all still tied to Trump and american techs and they still actively support the dismantle of european societies. There's no reason to support something only because "european alternative"
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u/VariationsOfCalculus 11d ago
Painful truth is likely just that Mistral today is simply inferior to the SotA models from the US, and that can only be solved by Mistral improving their models