French Startup Mistral AI Unveils Its First Generative AI Model

French startup Mistral AI has unveiled its first generative artificial intelligence (AI) model.

The company’s Mistral 7B is a “small-sized” model with 7 billion parameters, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Sept. 27). It will be available for free to developers.

“Mistral 7B is only a first step toward building the frontier models on our roadmap,” Mistral AI said in a Wednesday press release. “Yet, it can be used to solve many tasks: summarization, structuration and question answering to name a few. It processes and generates text much faster than large proprietary solutions and runs at a fraction of their costs.”

With its generative AI model, Mistral AI aims to rival top AI companies in the United States like Meta Platforms and OpenAI, according to the Bloomberg report.

Mistral AI said it has developed more efficient and cost-effective training methods, positioning itself as a strong contender in the AI market, the report said.

“We have training methods that make us more efficient and two times less expensive to implement,” Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch said in the report.

Generative AI can enable the creation of various content types, from videos to poetry, based on simple user commands. Mistral 7B can work with English and code, per the release.

The company has formed partnerships with four French firms to test the model across different applications, including customer service, chatbots, summaries and marketing content generation, Bloomberg reported.

Mistral AI’s model launch coincides with a period of heightened investor interest in transformative AI technologies. For example, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, underscoring the market’s recognition of AI’s potential and value.

Mistral AI, founded by three researchers with prior experience at companies like Meta and Google’s DeepMind, raised 105 million euros (about $110 million) in an initial financing round earlier this year, making it one of the largest seed rounds for a European generative AI firm, according to Bloomberg.

“There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative, and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor,” Mensch said when announcing the company’s seed funding in June.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.