Mistral AI

A Paris-based AI lab known for efficient open-weight European models — Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and the commercial Mistral Large.

Mistral AI is a French AI lab founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch (CEO, ex-DeepMind), Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix (both ex-Meta AI, key contributors to the original Llama). Based in Paris and Europe's most prominent AI lab, Mistral has raised over $1B in funding while staying notably efficient — they're often producing competitive results at smaller team sizes. It matters because Mistral is the European answer to American AI dominance, and because their models punched well above their weight class. Mistral 7B (September 2023) was widely regarded as the best 7B model when it launched. Mixtral 8x7B introduced a popular sparse MoE architecture to the open-source world. The Apache-2 licensing on early models made them widely adopted. Key products: Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and 8x22B (open-weight MoE), Mistral Large (commercial frontier), Codestral (coding), Mistral Embed, Le Chat (consumer assistant), and a partnership with Microsoft hosting Mistral models on Azure. Mistral has shifted some newer models toward proprietary licensing while continuing to release smaller models openly. They're a critical part of the open-source landscape and a counterweight to US-China AI duopoly. Related: Mistral family, Mixture of Experts, open-source, Llama family.