Mistral recently launched Europe’s first AI reasoning model as it tries to keep pace with American and Chinese rivals within the sphere of AI development. The French startup has attempted to differentiate itself by championing its European roots as well as making some of its models open source in contrast to other proprietary offerings.
Mistral is considered Europe’s best shot at having a home-grown AI competitor, but has lagged behind in terms of market share and revenue. Reasoning models use chain-of-thought techniques – a process that generates answers with intermediate reasoning abilities when solving complex problems. They could also be a promising path forward in advancing AI’s capabilities as the traditional approach of building ever-bigger large language models by adding more data and computing power begins to hit limitations.
For Mistral, which was valued by venture capitalists at $6.2 billion, an industry shift away from “scaling up” could give it a window to catch up against better capitalised rivals. Mistral is launching an open-sourced Magistral Small model and a more powerful version called Magistral Medium for business customers.
“The best human thinking isn’t linear – it weaves through logic, insight, uncertainty, and discovery. Reasoning language models have enabled us to augment and delegate complex thinking and deep understanding to AI,” Mistral said.
American companies have mostly kept their most advanced models proprietary, though a handful, such as Meta, has released open-source models. In contrast, Chinese firms such as DeepSeek have taken the open-source path to demonstrate their technological capabilities.
Source: Reuters
Image Credit: Dado Ruvic
