Mistral closes in on Big AI rivals with new open-weight frontier and small models

French AI startup Mistral launched its new Mistral 3 family of open-weight models on Tuesday – a 10-model release that includes a large frontier model with multimodal and multilingual capabilities, and nine smaller offline-capable, fully customizable models.

The launch comes as Mistral, which develops open-weight language models and a Europe-focused AI chatbot Le Chat, has appeared to be playing catch up with some of Silicon Valley’s closed source frontier models. The two-year-old startup, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, has raised roughly $2.7 billion to date at a $13.7 billion valuation – peanuts compared to the numbers competitors like OpenAI ($57 billion raised at a $500 billion valuation) and Anthropic ($45 billion raised at a $350 billion valuation) are pull