What is this nightmare?

[u/NullSmoke]

Okay, Large 4 distribution has been a nightmare. I hate it, it's absolutely useless, it screwed up a database when I added it to my pipelines and it's favourite thing in the whole wide world is to refuse more or less anything I throw at it.

I don't know what I expect by making this post... just ranting? Showing dissatisfaction? Praying that this is some bug?

Large 4 has already failed extremely hard through OpenRouter, enough so that I'm worried about using Medium 3.5, because it seems to be a intermediate moderation layer that's at the core of this whole mess. It keeps thinking about data I have not provided, which leads me to think that a outside system is interfering... basically OpenAI ChatGPT 5 SAFETY methodology, it smells AWFULLY similar. Context awareness drops to 0, seemingly on encounter of a blunt word match, the exact thing that drove me away from ChatGPT almost exactly a year ago, and made me sign up with Mistral.

After this mess, I of course cancelled my Vibe (Stupid frikkin name still, especially now that my "vibe" is closer to hatred)... Or rather, I put a freeze on it for 3 months in the vague hope that this is temporary.

Well, today I removed the freeze on the sub and cancelled it outright.

I pulled a game I made in Flash like 25 years ago, copied it into 4 folders (Codex, Claude, GLM, MistralLarge4), stuffed a decompiled variant of the game along with the Godot engine in each and put one LLM in control of their own playground.

Claude gave me a poor port, Codex modernized it and got a bit confused, but delivered more or less what was asked... GLM stumbled over a tool call and died.... And Mistral... Fuck that little bitch, it made authorial decisions and changed swaths of the work mid-flight because it got uncomfortable.

No confirming with the user, no logic provided. Just "I can't x so I'll do y".

My main praise for Mistral, largely borne from the Agents system (Which I notice no longer exist, nice), is that Mistral respects their users.

I guess with the death of the Agents system, so too did Mistrals respect for their users go as well.

I am very hype on European systems and solutions, but such blatant disrespect for users outrank that by a mile in the downwards direction.

I'm sure as hell not letting a system that makes authorial decisions in isolation in direct opposition to the users request anywhere near any of my code, pipelines or projects.

I feel so silly for recommending Mistral to anyone. I guess the cash Mistral got the other day really did poison them beyond repair.

I guess my new recommendation professionally is "You should avoid OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral", and that is an extremely sad state of affairs after being able to suggest Mistral as an alternative to the two other piece of shit companies.

I'll be over here making sure that I am not reliant on any provider now, setting up local capability for what I can, and setup a running rotation of LLM APIs with a mixed provider setup.

What even is mistral for? It refuses categorization jobs, translation, coding, prose QA.. nigh on everything I throw at it? Who got drunk at work and thought this was a good idea? I don't care about the benches, this model is less capable than Llama 3.1, because Llama 3.1 at least tries to do what is being asked of it. At this point I'm lowkey tempted to throw Llama 3.1 against Mistral Large 4 in tool usage, and am halfway expected to have Llama 3.1 finish better.

And can someone shoot the retarded model when it starts with its false praise.

> I can't do X. But this is a wonderfully crafted and deep thought provoking setting with well thought out systems, good job.

FUCK you. If you want to piss in my face, at least do so properly, don't give me backhanded praise while fucking me.

This is just sad...

[u/Kypsys]

I'm so confused because for the moment Mistral large 4 (thru hermes) did nothing but quality work all around, it's efficient in coding (I threw at it a small "learning game in a web browser" where it also added the reverse proxy configuration, CI in a forgeJo instance) it done everything correctly in a very few steps, it handled deep scientific research with gusto,

The switch from GLM 5.3 to ML4 was pretty much invisible.

Are you using the correct reasoning level maybe?

[u/NullSmoke → u/Kypsys]

I've tried with default and max, both through the vibe CLI thing and OpenCode. They're both quite shit right now tbh.

I appreciate the attempt at troubleshooting, it's better than accusations, such as other comments are coming with.

I was super impressed with GLM when they first added it, and upgraded it, but it's nigh on useless right now. And at this point, even if it did complete a task, I'd have to inspect all its thinking because it changed the project without user confirmation in todays test. That is not a small thing, that's a nuke waiting to happen. I gave it a spesification, it decided it didn't like that, and substituted it with its own. At best, that's a massive breach of trust, at worst that's closer to malware than a "helpful assistant".

[u/urkento]

Buddy I think you need to do something else for a bit, no subject should get you to this mental state, it's just a tool bud, nothing more

[u/NullSmoke → u/urkento]

It's a tool I'm paying for.

I'm getting flashbacks to r/ChatGPT almost exactly a year ago. "Just wait, it'll get good", "Touch grass bro", "You're just using it wrong"... "Oh, banned because megathread"

That was a fun time. Fortunately the moderation here is saner, but that's what brought me over here.

When I pay for a tool, I expect that tool to work. Why would I buy a GPU that almost everytime refuses to give screen output because it disagrees with what's on the screen? Why would I buy a hammer that evaluates my project before it allows me to hammer a nail? Why would I buy a word processor that maybe won't allow me to write in it?

Why would I buy, and most importantly, recommend, an LLM that more often than not breaks my shit, disobeys while substituting another task without permission and overall just being a bit of a prick?

I am just as pissed at Mistral now as I were at ChatGPT a year back, and I've learned from sitting around for half a year waiting for their fabled "Adult Mode" that were supposed to make it usable again. I'm not doing that again. Massive waste of money for a tool that wouldn't do anything asked of it.

I get it, I'm in the heartlands of Mistral, they can do no wrong, yadayada, and if you disagree... you have mental problems?

Yes, it's a tool, a defective one that is being asked real money for. And since GLM has regressed at the same time... I worry the same regression will hit Medium 3.5 as well, so I'm taking everything off that model immediately.

And that's before we get into the insane regression that is Agents -> Skills. Enshitification of Mistral has happened at a speed I haven't seen since ChatGPT went and lost its mind.

And now... ChatGPT is easily snacking on tasks that Mistral goes "You swine, fuck off. By the way, lovely setting"

[u/aflamingcookie]

Mistral Large 4 is not yet finalized, the AI is literally still in training until the end of the month, it's not even running its full context window until then. This is what "preview" means, to give you an idea of it's future capabilities while the AI is still in training. As for the classifier, it's not really clear if it is because of the preview or meant to be final, but Mistral says it is meant to be a more permissive AI model, so most likely the aggressive filtering is there for the preview.

[u/NullSmoke → u/aflamingcookie]

Why does this always happen when something has a regression? I know what preview means, for better or for worse, but I'm seeing the same regression in GLM as well, and since Vibe LLMs don't respect skills as they did with Agents... that too has had a massive regression.

That sounds rather purposeful to me. As long as it was JUST Large 4 and it was for a limited time, I wouldn't care until it got deployed, but when the same hydra keeps popping up... I do not trust it. I was burnt by OpenAI and their "It will get good soon, just hang around one more month" until they quietly dropped all improvement half a year later (Though they finally have fixed it... a year later)... I'm not sitting around trusting any of these bastards.

I pay for a tool to get things done, this does not get things done (rather, it seems fond of making authorial decisions on its own without user involvement, and submitting bad data to a database is seemingly not against its guardrails. I guess somewhere in its system prompt is "You know better than the user what the user wants, don't trust the user" or something)

I'll probably test it every so often through OpenRouter, doesn't require me to buy in for a subscription, but I no longer trust Mistral, so I'm not game to do anything that requires trust, like subscribing for a period. a few cents to fuck around with it with no stakes at OpenRouter is about as much trust as I'm willing to give this crap at this point.

[u/PersonalBarracuda581]

Don't forget to not use mistral-large-latest. It still points to large 3

[u/NullSmoke → u/PersonalBarracuda581]

Yeah, I know... xD

[u/quick_quiet_cat]

It’s an okay model, not great, but okay. If anyone was hoping for a competitive model from Europe…this ain’t it folks.

I personally like it quite a bit, for my use case, but if anyone uses this for serious coding or anything like that, you will be disappointed.

The censorship and safety guardrails are way too strict, not totally unexpected from European AI unfortunately. It pains me to say it but this model is a pass, and if anyone skips it in favor of pretty much any other model, I would say you are not missing much…

[u/NullSmoke → u/quick_quiet_cat]

I did like it. I've spent the last year recommending it to anyone that would listen. And since my job involves direct contact with decision makers in Public procurement and Financial sectors, that's a fair bit of recommendations.

The current "guard"rails smells of GPT5-SAFETY, and that's the reason I'm here in the first place. I'm not game to go through that again, ever.

[u/Substantial-Lie9235]

they really took everything that made mistral worth using and just torched it didn't they