French AI Startup Mistral Surprises Industry with Release of Powerful Language Model

French AI startup Mistral has released its latest large language model without any fanfare or press announcements, simply uploading it to a torrent link. Mixtral-8x7B outperforms models from Meta (Llama 2) and OpenAI (GPT-3.5), according to benchmarks provided by Mistral. People testing it online agree it is very capable. Mistral recently raised $415 million in a Series A funding round, valuing the company at $2 billion. Releasing the model without descriptions or marketing was praised by some as understanding "their primary audience to be engineers." The company's CEO said they pursue "an open, responsible and decentralized approach to technology."