The AI race is picking up pace like never before. Following Meta’s move just yesterday to launch its new open source Llama 3.1 as a highly competitive alternative to leading closed-source “frontier” models, French AI startup Mistral has also thrown its hat in the ring. The startup announced the next generation of its flagship open source model with 123 billion parameters: Mistral Large 2. However, in an important caveat, the model is only licensed as “open” for non-commercial research uses, including open weights, allowing third-parties to fine-tune it to their liking. For those seeking to use it for commercial/enterprise-grade applications, they will need to obtain a separate license and usage agreement from Mistral, as the company states in its blog post and in an X post from research scientist Devendra Singh Chaplot. While having a lower number of parameters — or internal model settings that guide its performance — than Llama 3.1’s 405 billion, it still nears the former’s performance. Available on the company’s main platform and via cloud partners, Mistral Large 2 builds on the original Large model and brings advanced multilingual capabilities with improved performance across reasoning, code generation and mathematics. It is being hailed as a GPT-4 class model with performance closely matching GPT-4o, Llama 3.1-405 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet across several benchmarks.

Full report : Mistral announces Mistral Large 2, the new generation of its flagship model, with 123B parameters; commercial usage requires a separate license.