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In a bold move, open-source model startup Mistral AI launched a new LLM today with just a torrent link. This unconventional release quickly sparked excitement, markedly different from Google’s recent Gemini launch, which OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy criticized as being overly polished.
Google’s demo video for Gemini has faced backlash over the past 24 hours for appearing overly edited and staged. In stark contrast, Mistral simply shared a link to download their new model, Mixtral 8x7B.
A Reddit post described Mistral LLM as a “scaled-down GPT-4,” explaining that it comprises 8 experts with 7 billion parameters each, where only 2 experts contribute to the inference of each token. The post further speculated, based on GPT-4 leaks, that the full GPT-4 model likely has 8 experts with 111 billion parameters each for their sections, along with 55 billion shared attention parameters, totaling 166 billion parameters per model, also using only 2 experts per token inference.
Uri Eliabayev, AI consultant and founder of the “Machine & Deep Learning Israel” community, told VentureBeat that Mistral is known for its minimalistic releases, often without any accompanying paper, blog, code, or press release. Open-source AI advocate Jay Scambler remarked that while the release approach was unusual, it successfully generated significant buzz, likely the intended effect.
The AI community quickly praised this guerrilla marketing strategy. Entrepreneur George Hotz and Eric Jang, vice president of AI at 1X Technologies and former Google robotics research scientist, both commended Mistral’s approach, with Jang noting that Mistral is becoming one of his favorite brands in the AI space.
Mistral, based in Paris, recently achieved a $2 billion valuation following a significant funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The startup is known for its record-setting $118 million seed round — the largest in Europe’s history — and its first major language AI model, Mistral 7B, which launched in September.
The company has also been active in the debate over the EU AI Act, lobbying the European Parliament for less regulation on open-source AI.