French AI Lab Mistral Releases New Models To Keep Pace With OpenAI And Google

Artificial intelligence startup Mistral on Tuesday introduced a new lineup of models as it seeks to match the capabilities of major AI labs such as Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek. The announcement follows recent model releases from peers and reflects an industrywide push to advance both research and commercial deployments.

The rollout includes a large model the company describes as the “world’s best open‑weight multimodal and multilingual” model, alongside a compact model tailored for robotics, edge devices and drones. Mistral said the large model is built to support agentic applications, AI assistants, retrieval‑augmented systems, scientific workloads and complex enterprise processes.

Founded in 2023, Mistral has become one of Europe’s prominent AI firms. In September the company closed a €1.7 billion funding round, with Dutch chip‑equipment maker ASML contributing €1.3 billion and Nvidia also participating. The financing raised Mistral’s valuation to €11.7 billion; previous backers include Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz.

Mistral described the new releases as expanding applied AI capabilities across robotics, autonomous drones, and on‑device applications that operate without network access, as well as supporting large‑scale enterprise agentic workflows. The smaller model, Ministral 3, is compact enough to run on drones, cars, robots, phones and laptops and can be deployed on a single GPU, which the company says reduces operating costs and speeds iteration.

The company highlighted the advantages of smaller models—lower inference costs, reduced latency and the ability to be specialized for domain‑specific tasks—while noting they can achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance relative to their size.

Mistral framed the release as part of a broader shift toward more efficient, faster and open AI, describing the effort as a step toward distributed intelligence. The launches coincide with intensified commercial activity to support the company’s near‑€12 billion valuation. Mistral announced a deal with HSBC to provide model access for use cases including financial analysis and translation, and said it has secured corporate contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.