How is this a problem? So many companies have been founded around premium versions of open-source products. It's good that they've even given us as much as they have. They have to make the economics work somehow.
IMO, it is just a new version of wage/code theft with a “public good” side-story to convince the gullible that it is somehow “better” and “fair”, when everyone involved were making money, just not as much money as they could be taking with a little bit of court-supported code theft and a hand-waive of “volunteerism”.
However, from a marketing perspective - think of who the users of an open model are. They're people who, for one reason or another, don't want to use OpenAI's APIs.
When selling a hosted API to a group predominantly comprised of people who reject hosted APIs - you've got to expect some push back.
From my perspective, I want to use the best model. But maybe as models improve and for certain use cases that will start to change. If I work on a project that has certain parts that are fulfilled by Mistral and can reduce cost, that's cool.
I'm surprised how expensive this model is compared to GPT-4. Only ~20% cheaper
You say you know people who use and fine tune Mistral / variants
You know what you can't do with Mistral Large? Fine tune it, or use variants.
But I guess I'm hearing you say now, a key point was- the attractive part about Mistral was the open model aspect.
But it's difficult to pay expenses and wages if you can't charge money.
Re: fine tuning- hard for me to believe they won't add it eventually.
I'm guessing all currently available paid options are operating at a (perhaps significant) loss in order to capture market share. So it might be that nobody can afford to push the prices even lower without significant risk of running out of money before any "market capture" can realistically be expected to happen...
But Mistral has been marketing itself as the underdog competitor whose offerings are on par with gpt-3.5-turbo and even gpt-4, while being pro-OSS.
Lies, damn lies.