Mistral 7B
Hacker ApprovedRanked 28 of 39 open-weight language models by recommenders
Free open-weights model people run locally for fast, offline use, especially on JavaScript and multilingual tasks. Critics call it dated next to newer models and unreliable for production.
Free open-weights model people run locally for fast, offline use, especially on JavaScript and multilingual tasks. Critics call it dated next to newer models and unreliable for production.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 76%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Runs locally and offline
“one of the best free/open models you can run locally on a MacBook. So fast too.”
Comment from 4 Aug 2026 in “Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation” “smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on an iPhone 17”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending” “it runs offline, and I don't need to download any massive URL list”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?” - Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Ask HN: What are the viable alternatives to DuckDuckGo?”
Fast on laptops and phones
“one of the best free/open models you can run locally on a MacBook. So fast too.”
Comment from 4 Aug 2026 in “Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation” “smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on an iPhone 17”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending” “Mistral 7b does it fine, instantly.”
Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “Everyone is building LLM routers, we deprecated ours” Handles tasks fine for years
“Used mistral 7b locally for years - it's fine.”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Mistral raises €3B” “running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Astral to Join OpenAI” “Mistral 7b was pioneering in its day”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Mistral OCR 4.1” - Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “Everyone is building LLM routers, we deprecated ours”
Beats some commercial models
“My local running Mistral 7b is a 100x better at modern JavaScript than any model on the market”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “Apple: Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation” “You can also use Ollama and get Mistral 7b which is better than anything Anthropic offers.”
Comment from 28 Jun 2026 in “Semgrep: GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our Cyber Benchmarks”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Outdated next to newer models
“It was a good model then. Now its not anywhere near where SOTA models are.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending” “Is hopelessly dated. There are much better newer models around.”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI” “that model is... not the best”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “What's in a GGUF, besides the weights – and what's still missing?”
Other open-weight language models people recommend
The four most recommended other open-weight language models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.8 27B | 1,173 | 426 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo32 owners | Approved |
| Z.ai GLM | 1,043 | 384 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo52 owners | Approved |
| Kimi | 931 | 359 | 72% | 13 | 1 mo26 owners | Approved |
| Gemma 4 | 713 | 249 | 74% | 13 | 1 mo14 owners | Approved |
| Mistral 7BThis page | 13 | 4 | 76% | 10 | — | Approved |
What people said
19 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Used mistral 7b locally for years - it's fine.”
“Mistral 7b was pioneering in its day”
“one of the best free/open models you can run locally on a MacBook. So fast too.”
“it runs offline, and I don't need to download any massive URL list”
“Another cool thing about Mistral 7b is it runs offline”
“it does work! Janky page crawling and ranking”
“Mistral 7b does it fine, instantly.”
“But it's worse than Mistral 7b”
“You can also use Ollama and get Mistral 7b which is better than anything Anthropic offers.”
“still can't be reliably used in something like a production setting”
“that model is... not the best”
“My local running Mistral 7b is a 100x better at modern JavaScript than any model on the market”
“running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine”
“You can also easily do Mistral7B and OSS 20B and others.”
“Is hopelessly dated. There are much better newer models around.”
“had the best multi-lingual support at the time”
“It was a good model then. Now its not anywhere near where SOTA models are.”
“smaller models like mistral-7b can run at 258 tokens/s on an iPhone 17”
“Tested on these AIs all positively”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.