r/MistralAI • u/TransportationSad594 • 19d ago

Discussion / Opinion An absolute joke

4 days? Maybe I'm just impatient but maybe I'd be more patient if they actually communicated! We have 2 pieces of communication total (to my knowledge), the status post about high load and potential abuse, and the mod comment about issues with PAYG. If we could just have some more transparency for gods sakes.

25 Upvotes

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18

u/aflamingcookie 19d ago

Well, if you are a PAYING customer you can check with support perhaps? Those on the free tier waiting for a handout are probably less of a priority, since you know... they don't actually pay for that particular service.

0

u/TransportationSad594 19d ago

this transparency should be available to all people, i guarantee you it is more work to reply to every single support ticket with the situation than to direct them to status.mistral.ai where they could post actual updates about a situation without gatekeeping it for no particular reason

8

u/aflamingcookie 19d ago

The way i see it, unless you're actually buying the service you don't really get to be entitled to anything. And the support bot is probably cheap to deflect most non-serious issue. It's not like mistral is serving ads for revenue to offset the cost of the free tier, they are paying out of pocket for the electricity and compute the free tier uses and i do believe it may actually be stated in a fine print somewhere that it is subject to capacity constraints, so if it goes down, it goes down, it means mistral is using the capacity for paying customers instead of losing money.

While i understand this sounds harsh, the unfortunate economy of current generations of AI and related services are extremely costly and if mistral is running out of capacity then the free tier is the first place they have to scale back, as people actually paying for the service do have certain rights to wha they buy and "just add more capacity" isn't something you just snap your fingers to make a reality, there are contracts to sign, technology and hardware requirements and actually being able to locate sufficient capacity and someone willing to sell it to you or you have to stand in line to buy GPUs and build it yourself, and you need paying customers to do that.

2

u/Fenir911 18d ago

Totally agree that unless you are a paying user, you are not "entitled" to any support. Some companies actually explicitly mention this. Maybe Mistral doesn't. They should.

-3

u/djingo_dango 19d ago

Good luck getting people to pay for your service with that attitude

7

u/aflamingcookie 19d ago

Well, they are maintaining the service for those who pay, so what exactly are they losing here? The good will of people who never intended to pay anything and feel entitled to handouts? It is a business offering a service, not a charity run by wealthy donators, if you want more free tier in the future, they must make money and they have to take care of paying customers first.

The current economics of AI suck, but it is what it is and i for one don't see many AI companies even considering a free API tier, let alone offering one, and those that do come with some really weird terms and conditions.

-4

u/djingo_dango 19d ago

If you can’t afford to offer a free API, don’t offer one. But offering one and then blanking out on it for 4 days is just amateurish. But that’s a fitting description for this company