[BoredomIsFun]

> it consistently ranks extremely low on benchmarks

As general purpose chatbots small Mistral models are better than comparably sized Chiniese models, as they have better SimpleQA scores and general knowledge of Western culture.

[seanmcdirmid]

It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, especially for role play where the instruction following is really useful. I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge, although I wonder if Chinese users get even better results from it?

[BoredomIsFun]

> It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, for role play

I am not sure if you actually tried that. Mistrals are widely asccepted go-to models for roleplay and creative writing. No Qwens are good at prose, except for their latest big Qwen 3.5.

> I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge,

It absolutely does, especially pop culture knowledge.