Mistral
France's Mistral AI (founded 2023 by ex-Meta/Google DeepMind researchers) — Europe's frontier challenger. Open-weights and proprietary models.
Mistral 7B (Sep 2023) set the standard for "small but capable" with Sliding Window Attention. Mixtral 8x7B (Dec 2023) popularised MoE for open weights. Larger proprietary: Mistral Large 2, Pixtral (multimodal), Codestral (code).
Licences vary: Apache 2.0 on some, Mistral Research License or commercial on others. Available via la-plateforme.mistral.ai, Azure AI, AWS Bedrock. Defining trait: a faster cycle than American competitors, EU-anchored data.