French artificial intelligence company Mistral introduces Europe's first AI model, specifically built for reasoning, and has established itself as a serious candidate for a global race dominated by US and Chinese players. The company announced the launch of two new models on Tuesday. It's a more powerful enterprise version called open source Gagistral Small and Magistral Medium.
Unlike traditional large-scale language models that rely heavily on vast datasets and computational power, inference models employ chain thinking and step-by-step problems to arrive at solutions that are more accurate and contextually aware. Mistral's movement occurs when AI developers around the world begin to move away from brute force scaling and towards more subtle, human-like logic in machine learning systems.
“The best human thoughts are not linear, they interweave logic, insight, uncertainty and discovery. The reasoning language model has allowed us to delegate and delegate complex thinking and deep understanding to AI,” the company said in a statement.
The launch marks a strategic moment for Mistral, who has been garnering high-profile support, including support from French President Emmanuel Macron. The Paris-based startup is valued at $6.2 billion, but so far has lagged behind bigger rivals such as Openai, Google and China's Deepseek.
Still, broader changes in the industry could work in their advantage. As performance limitations increase as existing models scale, by focusing on inferences on the volume of raw data, innovation-focused companies like Mistral have a better chance of leaps and bounds with their competitors.
Currently, the Guctistral Small model is available for download by hugging your face and supports inference in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic and simplified Chinese. By making this model open source, Mistral will participate in a small but growing cohort of companies driving AI transparency, as opposed to the closed model strategies most US companies employ.
While Openai and Google introduced the inference model last year, Chinese engineers like Deepseek and Alibaba gained traction by offering cost-effective open source alternatives. Another major AI player, Meta, has yet to launch a standalone inference model, but claims that the latest product includes inference functionality.
