There's a lot of criticism of Mistral being unable to compete with large model, and that's fair. But I think it dismisses what Mistral is actually doing, which is making specific capabilities available at high quality in tiny models.

I do a lot of OCR, file analysis, stuff like that. I use Mistral for that. I put 100$ into my account, and it just runs for a year without any worries about the amount of requests I make, because the cost is minuscule. That's valuable, even if it doesn't compete with Opus 4.8.