France's Mistral launches Europe's first AI reasoning model
Mistral on Tuesday launched Europe's first AI reasoning model, which uses logical thinking to create a response, as it tries to keep pace with American and Chinese rivals at the forefront of AI development.
The French start-up has attempted to differentiate itself by championing its European roots, winning the support of French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as making some of its models open source in contrast to the proprietary offerings of OpenAI or Alphabet's Google.
Mistral is considered Europe's best shot at having a home-grown AI competitor, but has lagged behind in terms of market share and revenue. Reasoning models use chain-of-thought techniques - a process that generates answers with intermediate reasoning abilities when solving complex problems.
DeepSeek broke through as a viable competitor in January through its low-cost, open-sourced AI models. Photo: AFP
They could also be a promising path forward in advancing AI's capabilities as the traditional approach of building ever-bigger large language models by adding more data and computing power begins to hit limitations.
For Mistral, which was valued by venture capitalists at US$6.2 billion, an industry shift away from 'scaling up' could give it a window to catch up against better capitalised rivals.
China's DeepSeek broke through as a viable competitor in January through its low-cost, open-sourced AI models, including one for reasoning. OpenAI was the first to launch its reasoning models last year, followed by Google a few months later.
Meta has not yet released a stand-alone reasoning model, though it said its latest top-shelf model has reasoning capabilities.
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