Oligopolies & A Bet Against Everything

TLDR;

This week, we take a look at Europe’s first reasoning model, o3-pro’s puzzling behavior, a first in the space, creating models from plain text, and the concerning oligopolistic trend of the AI industry.

And for the trend of the week, we take a look at Meta’s V-JEPA-2, a model that presents the first real alternative to Generative AI, and that’s saying something.

Enjoy!

THEWHITEBOX

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REASONING MODELS

Magistral, Mistral’s First Reasoning Model

Finally, Europe has its first reasoning model, called Magistral. Coming in two sizes (soon, three), it’s competitive with other open-weight models, such as DeepSeek’s v3 and R1.

Interestingly, if you followed my last two Leaders posts and have Goose and OpenRouter installed on your computer, you can try both models today, as I did below:

Sadly, Magistral did not catch the ruse.

Additionally, they shared a lot of valuable information about how they trained the models, which we’ll cover this Sunday because it’s the first ‘big’ lab to cover training in such detail.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

But is it really that good, though?

My problem with this release is that they “forgot” to include a comparison with the Qwen 3 models (the ones I recommend you use locally if you have the hardware for it).

And the truth is that Mistral’s reasoning model is, plain and straightforward, worse than the Qwen models at comparative sizes, as shown below

Source

Worse still, the comparison they make in the graph above with DeepSeek’s R1 model is based on the January version, which is considerably worse than the one we have now in May, which seems disingenuous at best.

All in all, good model, but it doesn’t appear like sincere reporting, and it’s not the first time we have seen this from Mistral, which leads me to believe, with no hesitation, that the best open-source models on this planet are Chinese, and it’s not even debatable anymore.

OPENAI

o3-Pro makes mistakes that are hard to justify

Two days after the release of OpenAI’s flagship model, o3-pro, I can say with confidence that the model is equally impressive (best model for complex cases) as it shows, in bright colors, that their alleged intelligence is vastly overblown.

In fact, we are seeing several instances in which the models, despite their alleged ‘PhD-level intelligence’, make mistakes that are borderline preschool-level or take too long to answer elementary questions.

For instance, the model takes 15 minutes, yes, 15 minutes, to count the number of ‘r’s in the word ‘strawberry.’

In other simple questions, the lack of attention…

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