I prefer their old name
Wtf why…
The name alone would make me steer clear of Mistral.
But I’ll tell you what made me steer clear of Mistral before they even changed the name of their product: I called their rep to tell them my company - which is sizeable - tasked me to investigate AI solutions that aren’t American, and I needed help to evaluate their offering, with the possibility of landing our entire company as a business customer, and the rep never followed through.
That told me everything I needed to know about Mistral.
Update?
Yep: the company decided to invest in local AI machines. All the “regular” devs get a 6k€ machine (this one) and the power users will get a 30k€ one (not sure which kind yet). The machines run whatever the devs like - in my case, llama.cpp and the GPT-OSS-120B coding model. It works well to spews out boilerplate and serves as a really handy “super search engine” that can code examples for me. That’s all I need to work faster with AI.
I’m glad the company went that route. Cloud shit is shit and I don’t like it, and I like cloud AI shit even less. Local AI makes us free from American vagaries at a very reasonable cost - at least for a company.
Mistral lost our business by not being proactive and I’m glad they did.


