This modified MIT stinks.
This is not MIT.
I normally get flamed in comments when I post stuff like this on this site now, but I hope someone in Mistral sees this. We relied on you. We put thousands of hours of work into you as a community. We believed in you because you offered us safety, and contributed to collective intelligence. It was symbiotic. It's a pretty heartbreaking bait and switch. Feels very OpenAI. Not cool.
Sucks too, because this model is almost exactly what I've been pining for. Ah, well... the tug of war moves an inch towards the elite hoarding technology away from the general public. RIP Mistral. You were my fav lab by far for a long time, honestly grieving a little.
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You've misread. I don't make $20m serving llms, I make a low wage on living allowance chunks of research grants.
Now I could be wrong about this:
Mistral came to prominence with mistral 7b, before mixtral. Mixtral was not nearly as widely adopted. While mistral saw some rp tunes, this explosion was so massive it also arguably launched Eric's career in ml, getting him support from a16z just from the dolphin mistral release and giving the world a MASSIVE security heads up long before abliteration techniques were a twinkle. The dolphin line was arguably the most important derivative work, and was not rp.
Also, for every project you see in your narrow scope on HF, 100 stacks are quietly using the technology. THAT is the important part, the collective ownership of intelligence, not role playing.
BUT HEY! Even if you want to go down the road of that pot shot, latitude AI also largely has mistral to thank, and they have moved some dollars. Like it or not, character AI had a massive evaluation. Latitude moved away from gpt-j/the pile. (Almost like open intelligence makes the entire ai landscape safer, CRAZY idea, I know) and towards the second era of Mistral, Nemo, which you also seem to have completely forgotten. Even if you don't like it, there is a MASSIVE market for RP. It's not going away.
Regardless it was the early days of mistral that gave them visibility. By the time 24b small came out (likely the ERP tunes you're discussing) Mistral was acquired by Microsoft. Almost everything you said is wrong. The way ai funding works isn't whatever they make they can spend. Brand new companies get insane evaluations and are purchased for half a billion dollars, most ai ventures hemorrhage money, and microsoft is bankrolling Mistral.
I'm not going to quote anything you said or whatever since you deleted it, but it's in my email. Cheers.
As long as the floor of the license remains at 20 millions of revenue per month, i don't really see a problem with this license. And if you make more than that then surely you can afford to cut some kind of business deal with Mistral.
I just see them protecting their own backside here from companies like Cursor who just go in there and steal other's models without hesitation - and the latter is just not fair.
[deleted]
You've misread. I don't make $20m serving llms, I make a low wage on living allowance chunks of research grants.
Now I could be wrong about this:
Mistral came to prominence with mistral 7b, before mixtral. Mixtral was not nearly as widely adopted. While mistral saw some rp tunes, this explosion was so massive it also arguably launched Eric's career in ml, getting him support from a16z just from the dolphin mistral release and giving the world a MASSIVE security heads up long before abliteration techniques were a twinkle. The dolphin line was arguably the most important derivative work, and was not rp.
Also, for every project you see in your narrow scope on HF, 100 stacks are quietly using the technology. THAT is the important part, the collective ownership of intelligence, not role playing.
BUT HEY! Even if you want to go down the road of that pot shot, latitude AI also largely has mistral to thank, and they have moved some dollars. Like it or not, character AI had a massive evaluation. Latitude moved away from gpt-j/the pile. (Almost like open intelligence makes the entire ai landscape safer, CRAZY idea, I know) and towards the second era of Mistral, Nemo, which you also seem to have completely forgotten. Even if you don't like it, there is a MASSIVE market for RP. It's not going away.
Regardless it was the early days of mistral that gave them visibility. By the time 24b small came out (likely the ERP tunes you're discussing) Mistral was acquired by Microsoft. Almost everything you said is wrong. The way ai funding works isn't whatever they make they can spend. Brand new companies get insane evaluations and are purchased for half a billion dollars, most ai ventures hemorrhage money, and microsoft is bankrolling Mistral.
I'm not going to quote anything you said or whatever since you deleted it, but it's in my email. Cheers.
Greetings, once again.
You would be surprised to know I actually deleted my comment because I came to the realization that it is not worth my time discussing and editing what you saw in your e-mail. Additionally, I did not publish any secrets in the mentioned comment either, so no worries quoting it.
Your opened discussion, titled "This modified MIT stinks." originally had no bases I could help or argue with, and your opening comment's content was simply a comment, not a request for chance or an argument. This is the reason I deleted my response shortly after I had posted it.
As of 01/05/2026, 14:36 (DD/MM/YYYY, HH:MM using UTC+1), the comment you wrote that started this thread is:
This is not MIT.
I normally get flamed in comments when I post stuff like this on this site now, but I hope someone in Mistral sees this. We relied on you. We put thousands of hours of work into you as a community. We believed in you because you offered us safety, and contributed to collective intelligence. It was symbiotic. It's a pretty heartbreaking bait and switch. Feels very OpenAI. Not cool.
Sucks too, because this model is almost exactly what I've been pining for. Ah, well... the tug of war moves an inch towards the elite hoarding technology away from the general public. RIP Mistral. You were my fav lab by far for a long time, honestly grieving a little.
Regarding what I read as your desire to continue this conversation, I am more than happy to revise my argumentation skills.
My response has two parts:
- Arguing your original comment.
- Arguing your comment posted here.
This section argues your original comment, specifically following statements:
- "We put thousands of hours of work into you as a community." (not directly, but see the second paragraph of this section)
- "It was symbiotic."
This section assumes you refer to the open-source community using Mistral's open-source models, or their derivatives as 'We'. This is because you phrased your sentence "We put thousands of hours of work into you as a community." in a way that associates 'We' and 'as a community' as the same entity.
It is not true that the community put in thousands of hours of work into Mistral. For this paragraph, I define "work" as active human work in which actions were performed for solely the goal of developing Mistral as a company (since you referred to "Mistral", not Mistral's products). "thousands of hours" are defined in the scope of this paragraph as at least 2,000h (roughly 83.3d). This is because it is not possible to donate to Mistral as a community. Mistral AI is a private, for-profit startup, not an organization that needs small donations from small, fragmented communities. Mistral as a company had roughly 350 employees in the year 2025 [src]. These employees actively put in working hours to build the company, not an open-source community that finetunes their models. Often, these finetunes do not provide any financial value to Mistral AI. Additionally, popular models built upon Mistral AI's base models are often made for additional censorship removal, a requirement for erotic roleplaying and mainly illegal use. Mistral AI's model are often known for having minimal restrictions, generally only refusing to answer prompts containing illegal content. That kind of community-work is not productive to Mistral AI. This paragraph proves that the open-source community did not put in thousands of hours of work into Mistral AI which is a private, for-profit startup.
You statement about the open-source community and Mistral AI having a "symbiotic" relationship is not true either. Mistral AI is, as explained above, a private, for-profit startup, that published most of its products under an open-source license. These products were used by the open-source community. This did not create financial gain for Mistral AI. Even before this model's release, Mistral AI had closed-sourced models which you could pay to use over their API. That's fractionally how a machine-learning startup makes its money. The mentioned relation was therefore not symbiotic.
This section argues on basis of your newer comment, specifically following:
- Eric Hardford's Dolphin model series' relevance to this conversation
- Me having a narrow scope of Hugging Face.
- Latitude AI's relevance to this conversation
- Mistral being acquired by Microsoft.
The Dolphin model series is not relevant to this thread. Your response is incoherent. Dolphin models were designed to respond in an uncensored manner. They were known for acceptable performance in coding (specifically web-based languages and Python) and, at least for the time, exceptional conversational tasks and creative writing, which goes back to roleplaying. These models being uncensored adds the 'e' to 'rp' (roleplaying), creating models for erotic roleplaying. Additionally, this has no relevance to what you were pointing out: Mistral AI's modified MIT license on this model release.
You can not prove I have a narrow scope of Hugging Face. I advise you to refrain from making statements about me that you can not prove. I came to the conclusion that most popular Mistral finetunes are ERP-related, because that is exactly what this page shows.
Nevertheless, Latitude AI has no relevance to this conversation either. You keep writing without substance. Latitude AI is private, for-profit company. As of writing this text, I do not know of any type of subscription they offer that allows use of this model. Roleplaying with autoregressive, conversational language models does have a large market, but no relevance to this conversation.
It is also incorrect that Microsoft acquired Mistral AI. Rather, the two companies entered a partnership in which Microsoft made a minority investment of €15M [src]. While stating that almost my entire comment is wrong ("Almost everything you said is wrong."), you fail to make arguments that hold up logical reasoning.
I end my response here and will refrain from further interacting with this discussion because I have invested more time than I should have. You would not be reading this text if you would have simply ignored my deleted comment, but instead, you generated a response larger than it needed to be with no substance. This wasted both of our time.
Farewell.
I posted this under the EAGLE variant, but it applies here too, and this seems to be where the discussion is happening:
You state that "We release this model under a Modified MIT License: Open-source license for both commercial and non-commercial use with exceptions for companies with large revenue."
Please take "MIT" out of the name. This is NOT an MIT license. MIT has not released a "Modified" license. You are using the goodwill established by the real MIT License over decades and inverting it's meaning. It CONFLICTS with the MIT license. It is NOT an open source license.
You can license your model however you want. I am not disputing that.
But you should NOT call it MIT, when it is not.
You should NOT call it open source, when it is not.
Your exceptions CONFLICT with open source licenses and the MIT license.
Please correct your documentation.
Just on the naming - I agree that they should not refer to it as MIT license anymore in the naming. Now it's just their own license.