Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation

126

rriadsila about 4 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on mistral.ai

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 887 words in the discussion.

Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

fastball•about 2 hours ago

Should've called it Safestral.

Also I do like Mistral's seemingly newer strategy of focusing on smaller, more fine-tuned models for various use-cases, presumably the result of their large MoE models not competing effectively with the frontier models.

himata4113•about 1 hour ago

It's not that their strategy is to train smaller models, it's the only choice they have. Training SOTA takes anywhere from 1.5b to 150b. We don't know the real cost of training for the chinese models, but mistral neither has the compute nor money to do that.

hypfer•about 1 hour ago

I would be curious if this can do moderation with an arbitrary ruleset, or if it's just "that one moderation style" we already know from current big tech platforms.

The kind where malicious intent is okay if the words are nice.

___

Or, rephrased: How big is the space in which you can tune this model without retraining.

Is it just "we hate sex"/"we don't hate sex" "We hate violence"/"we don't hate violence" or is it _truly_ as flexible as claimed?

Maybe something like "Is this guy a corporate fraud that is going to waste my time with performative nonsense?"

That would be the true test for a moderation model and I would be immensely impressed if it could manage to pull that off.

___

Edit: Looking at the paper though.. probably not.

I suppose this is useful for B2B, which seems to be mistrals whole thing. Question is just if it is also useful for society to hand the SV prefab morals down like that. Kinda like cultural imperialism but with an ethical spin.

Maybe opinions on those base datasets could occasionally differ more than the model can be steered.

mosura•about 2 hours ago

Someone should use this to do the exact opposite of the intention: filter for “offensive” content, and boost it or collate it into a newsletter/email blast for people of culture.

You have to give it to Mistral they do at least know what the market near them says they want right now. The great problem is in a few years of this that market won’t be worth anything.

Edit to add, you could also add this to an AI workflow so as to produce content that walks right up to the line but doesn’t trigger it.

kergonath•15 minutes ago

> The great problem is in a few years of this that market won’t be worth anything.

To be fair, we don’t know how much resources they put into this and how much of a distraction it was. If it was quick enough to train or fine tune and it brings them valuable experience for the next models, it could well be worth it in the long run even if there is no direct successor.

pebbly_bread•9 minutes ago

Also, it sounds like the kind of thing that sells. Any company with a customer support chat is a potential user of this model, any large company may be interested in getting a mistral installed set-up for handling without needing to send client info over the web. Installing those kinds of local systems seems to be what butters Mistral's bread at the moment.

mcintyre1994•30 minutes ago

> filter for “offensive” content, and boost it or collate it into a newsletter/email blast for people of culture.

I think that's the main service that xAI provide for X.

petcat•about 1 hour ago

> they do at least know what the market near them says they want right now

It does seem to be a very European approach to AI that their flagship AI lab is just making models that do nothing other than monitor and moderate internet content.

I guess they know that the EU AI Act, Chat Control, etc are going to cause a lot of companies to need this kind of compliance.

kergonath•9 minutes ago

> It does seem to be a very European approach to AI that their flagship AI lab is just making models that do nothing other than monitor and moderate internet content.

Well, first Mistral is French more than European. This might be a difficult distinction to make from the US but their approach is quite different from e.g. typical German companies.

Then, this is just a small model they release on the side. If that’s your benchmark, they released somewhat recently Voxtral, Voxtral transcribe, their OCR model, and Leanstral. I don’t think you can get much insight on their culture from this kind of release.

lava_pidgeon•about 1 hour ago

Some of the best social media is heavily moderate. This includes HN and r/credible defense . With a Quiet transparent and cheap LLM I imagine a social media website where you can have good discussion about everything around the world it would be a game changer and on my to-do list.

petcat•about 1 hour ago

> Some of the best social media is heavily moderate

Heavily moderated by humans with discretion.

Not AI chat bots following a rules engine.

cinntaile•31 minutes ago

Another commenter already mentioned that it's more likely a lack of compute and funding that forces their hand to focus on niche tasks.

pwython•23 minutes ago

I've had dreams of building something in the image sharing or social platform realm, but stopped short of planning because of obvious content moderation responsibilities. This seems to be a realistic, cost effective solution to that one piece of the puzzle.

kergonath•16 minutes ago

I am not sure how reliable it is in the real world. Also, in terms of liability, I don’t know how effective it would be to satisfy various regulations compared to a human moderator team.

nezhar•about 3 hours ago

Model: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Shieldstral-1.0-3B

elianaive•about 1 hour ago

I'm a bit doubtful that a black box approach like this to moderation will ever catch on.

lenerdenator•about 2 hours ago

I'd really like to see more conversation around Mistral's models. It's good to see Europe developing AI.

BlackRabbit1•about 2 hours ago

The problem is that their performance is too far away from the latest generation of Asian models.

They had kept up in the mid-range a few years ago. But this standing is sadly long gone.

If you need a fast Opensource'ed LLMs you can go for EU-hosted DeepSeek or Qwen.

yborg•about 1 hour ago

By this logic the Chinese should have just given up and let the American AI companies have the market because they were so far behind. I'm sure Europe has the capability to distill other people's frontier models to catch up if they wish to do so.

baq•about 1 hour ago

Distilling is unsafe from export control perspective - Chinese models are poisoned by US frontier distillation and a case can be made that the US won’t like distilling what they may consider transitively theirs, which they will the moment you’re anywhere near competitive.

petcat•about 2 hours ago

Mistral needs to abandon their Everything-stral branding. Getting kind of lame.

"Shieldstral" is an awkward and bad name

braiamp•about 2 hours ago

That naming only works if you commit to the bit even when it doesn't make sense. That builds branding.

cyanregiment•about 1 hour ago

Was this one the last stral for you?

The stral the broke the camel's back?

whythismatters•about 1 hour ago

The shortest stral has been pulled for you

simlevesque•about 1 hour ago

People complain when a product use a familiar name that might collide and there's also people complaining when they invent new words altogether.

Naming things is hard.

vardalab•about 1 hour ago

Says who? I kind of like it.

ranger_danger•40 minutes ago

There can be other valid perspectives than your own