I recently upgraded a large portion of my pipeline from gpt-4.1-mini to gpt-5-mini. The performance was horrible - after some research I decided to move everything to mistral-medium-0525.

Same price, but dramatically better results, way more reliable, and 10x faster. The only downside is when it does fail, it seems to fail much harder. Where gpt-5-mini would disregard the formatting in the prompt 70% of the time, mistral-medium follows it 99% of the time, but the other 1% of the time inserts random characters (for whatever reason, normally backticks... which then causes it's own formatting issues).

Still, very happy with Mistral so far!

If someone from mistral comes around, is there a way for third party MCP implementation to be in the connector directory? I built a MCP connector allowing people to connect to every possible file transfer protocol from S3 to FTP(S), SFTP, SMB, NFS, Gdrive, Dropbox, azure blob, onedrive, sharepoint, etc.. and have a couple layers to delegate authentication, enforce authorisation, support for RBAC and create chroots so the LLM can't go haywire + tools to visualise and or edit hundreds of file format. Would be awesome to get it listed, and it's open source: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

Mistral recently being valued at $14 billion in the previous funding appears like a steal to me, especially compared to the Anthropic and OAI valuations. Would be interesting to compare revenues and growth rates as well to put these valuations into better perspective.

Apart from that, Mistral appears to remain the only really relevant new player with European ties in the Gen AI space. Aleph Alpha is not heard of anymore and is essentially steered by the Schwarz Group now, so at least chances of an acquihire I guess.

I pay to use ProtonMail’s privacy preserving Lumo LLM Chat with good web_search tooling. Lumo is powered by Mistral models.

I use Lumo a lot and usually results are good enough. To be clear though, I do fall back on gemini-cli and OpenAI’s codex systems for coding a few times a week.

I live in the US, but if I were a European, I would be all in on supporting Mistral. Strengthen your own country and region.

I've never used their models, but I love that design. Kudos to the Mistral design team, the modern pixel art look with orange colors is very cool.

Why would I want to use Mistral's MCP services instead of official MCP services from Notion, Stripe, etc.? It seems to me that the official MCP services would be strictly better, e.g. because I don't have to grant access to my resources to Mistral.

Related, Mistral is closing ơn a funding round at $14 billion valuation

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-03/mistral-s...

> Directory of 20+ secure connectors

What does secure mean in this context? I didn't see it explained here.

Perhaps they mean this?

> Admin users can confidently control which connectors are available to whom in their organization, with on-behalf authentication, ensuring users only access data they’re permitted to.

Custom connectors are cool and a good selling point but they have to be remote (afaik there is no Le Chat Desktop) so using it with local resources it's not impossible, but hard to set up and not very practical (you need tail scale funnel or equivalent).

> Everything available on the Free plan

Cool!

I want to love Mistral but never really used their products. What are they good enough for / great at?

I use Qwen Chat as my daily, it’s good and does the job very well. I have never thought about trying out Mistral, is their model good at anything? Any area it excels at? Or is it far behind all the other models?

Collection of Remote only MCP Servers here: https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-mcp-servers

All I can think about is "La Chat" from three 6 mafia

How effective are Mistral's models at this point?

My perception using them is that they have comparable models to OpenAI and others when it comes to general use 'chat' tasks, but they don't match something like gpt-5 Pro or high thinking when you need something more powerful.

Perhaps the problem is that you need to be competing right at the frontier, or not at all. I put Cohere in a similar bucket.

With all the recent news, I cas see Mistral raising billions soon. Not that I endorse it, though.

I don't use any of those products except github. which i don't need mcp for since i use claude code with gh cli installed.

It feels like the only path Mistral has to win is by targeting risk-averse European enterprises by waving the EU banner and having them force it on their employees. Even then, if they fall far enough behind they won't be able to do that either. Seems like a sad outcome for European tech given all the talent Europe has. It's frustrating.

You watch the OpenAI launch videos and its a surprising variety of Europeans accents talking about all the value they're creating in the US, instead of back home, simply due to the more favorable business/investment policies of the US.

My pet theory is, outside of the silly regulatory stance, the real reason Europe can never compete in each wave of tech (mainframe > pc > internet > mobile > social > AI > etc.) is government pension systems hoovering up all private capital and investing it into european governments (bonds) instead of european businesses (equities).

Centralizing the financial assets of an entire country, subjecting it to the whims of politics thus requiring it be invested it into extremely low risk bonds instead of a larger portion in European equity indexes or even a tiny portion in venture capital has created this situation: https://i.redd.it/fxks3skmvt4e1.png

Yes, a vast majority of VC funds lose money. Hence why it's bucketed in 'alternatives' and never a major part of pension portfolios. But the small group of winners literally create the future tax base to fund the social welfare system to continue existing (not to mention the future military tech which it turns out is useful when your neighbors get hostile). Not taking the risk means you never get the reward.

If Europe put even 1-2% of their $5T in pension assets into venture...even grossly mismanaged Softbank style...I find it hard to imagine you wouldn't accidentally create a few $100+ Billion companies in 10-20 years. More important would be creating the startup ecosystem for taking the rest of the worlds capital into these ventures as a multiplier.

It looks like Mistral wants to collect data before people are able to try out the sacred "AI". Too bad. If all training sites that Mistral stole had done the same, Mistral would not exist.

Naturally, Cloudflare is in the business, too:

https://docs.mistral.ai/deployment/self-deployment/cloudflar...

mistral.ai name servers:

  Name Server: ivan.ns.cloudflare.com
  Name Server: ada.ns.cloudflare.com

Every time I tried a Mistral model I was left rather underwhelmed and just went back to the usual options. Seems like their only USP at this point is Made in EU.

Strongest argument I see for Mistral is that it's European. Which isn't a very good argument.