> they do at least know what the market near them says they want right now
It does seem to be a very European approach to AI that their flagship AI lab is just making models that do nothing other than monitor and moderate internet content.
I guess they know that the EU AI Act, Chat Control, etc are going to cause a lot of companies to need this kind of compliance.
Some of the best social media is heavily moderate. This includes HN and r/credible defense . With a Quiet transparent and cheap LLM I imagine a social media website where you can have good discussion about everything around the world it would be a game changer and on my to-do list.
> Some of the best social media is heavily moderate
Heavily moderated by humans with discretion.
Not AI chat bots following a rules engine.
Wouldn't discretion "just" be a really good rules engine?
No, they are moderated by arbitrary company moderation policies not humans with independent thoughts.
AI can do exactly that.
> Heavily moderated by humans with discretion.
Pretty sure both of the above have extensive automation in their moderation.
The bulk of moderation work is things which are easy and obvious.
The correct way to moderate is automation with certainty falling back to humans with discretion.
The new frontier of moderation should be blocking illiterate comments, as in the commenter is replying as though they didn't read or read and didn't understand.
I'd rather be censored by an AI than a reddit mod.
> It does seem to be a very European approach to AI that their flagship AI lab is just making models that do nothing other than monitor and moderate internet content.
Well, first Mistral is French more than European. This might be a difficult distinction to make from the US but their approach is quite different from e.g. typical German companies.
Then, this is just a small model they release on the side. If that’s your benchmark, they released somewhat recently Voxtral, Voxtral transcribe, their OCR model, and Leanstral. I don’t think you can get much insight on their culture from this kind of release.
Another commenter already mentioned that it's more likely a lack of compute and funding that forces their hand to focus on niche tasks.
Ugh. There's nothing inherently European about Chat Control. It's a dumb proposal, and it's European. Any free society has a bunch of dumb proposals.
Nor is there anything inherently European about the AI Act. But that one I wouldn't even call dumb. At times misguided and confused, perhaps, but some of its core principles are valuable.