French AI startup Mistral launched its new Mistral 3 family of open-weight models on Tuesday, a release that presents a different focus than that of its big Western tech rivals. The 10-model release includes a large frontier model with multimodal and multilingual capabilities and nine smaller offline-capable, fully customisable models. The release represents a pointed bet by Mistral that the future of artificial intelligence lies not in building ever-larger proprietary systems, but in offering businesses maximum flexibility to customise and deploy AI tailored to their specific needs, often using smaller models that can run without cloud connectivity.
Mistral 3 includes nine small, dense models, grouped under the Ministral 3 series name. These models span three sizes – 14 billion, 8 billion, and 3 billion parameters – and three use cases – a base model, a chat and a reasoning model. The release also includes Mistral Large 3, the company's most capable model to date, featuring a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture trained with 41 billion active and 675 billion total parameters. Large 3 debuts at number two in the open-source non-reasoning models category on the LMArena leaderboard, positioning it amongst the first open frontier models with multimodal and multilingual capabilities. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 licence, reflecting Mistral's belief that AI's next evolution will be defined not by sheer scale, but by ubiquity: models small enough to run on drones, in vehicles, in robots, and on consumer devices.
Rather than competing primarily on benchmark performance, Mistral is targeting enterprise customers frustrated by the cost and inflexibility of proprietary systems, demonstrating how the Mistral 3 family represents a fundamental shift in the competitive landscape. The release marks an important moment in the open-weight AI movement, challenging the dominance of closed, cloud-dependent systems from major technology companies.
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Sources:
1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/mistral-closes-in-on-big-ai-rivals-with-mistral-3-open-weight-frontier-and-small-models/
2. https://venturebeat.com/ai/mistral-launches-mistral-3-a-family-of-open-models-designed-to-run-on
3. https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-3
