Mistral AI drops new open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o Mini with fraction of parameters
French artificial-intelligence startup Mistral AI unveiled a new open-source model today that the company says outperforms similar offerings from Google and OpenAI, setting the stage for increased competition in a market dominated by U.S. tech giants.
The model, called Mistral Small 3.1, processes both text and images with just 24 billion parameters a fraction of the size of leading proprietary models while matching or exceeding their performance, according to the company.
“This new model comes with improved text performance, multimodal understanding, and an expanded context window of up to 128k tokens,” Mistral said in a company blog post announcing the release. The firm claims the model processes information at speeds of 150 tokens per second, making it suitable for applications requiring rapid response times.
By releasing the model under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, Mistral is pursuing a markedly different strategy than its larger competitors, which have increasingly restricted access to their most powerful AI systems. The approach highlights a growing divide in the AI industry between closed, proprietary systems and open, accessible alternatives.
