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French start-up Mistral has released a new series of powerful \u201copen\u201d artificial intelligence models, as it pushes to gain a crucial edge in the race to develop the cutting-edge technology. <\/p>\n
The Paris-based group on Tuesday claimed its latest large language system, called Mistral Large 3, was one of the world\u2019s best multimodal and multilingual open-weight models, offering the ability to be used in most European languages as well as some Asian ones. <\/p>\n
The new release comes amid growing concerns that Europe is falling behind the US and China in AI development. Research last month showed that Chinese developers such as DeepSeek and Alibaba have overtaken their US rivals<\/a> in the global market for open AI models for the first time this year. <\/p>\n Guillaume Lample, co-founder and chief scientist at Mistral<\/a>, said making these models open was \u201caligned with our mission of putting AI in the hands of everyone\u201d. He added: \u201cI think it\u2019s important that we have a company in Europe that is able to create this frontier model.\u201d<\/p>\n Mistral has long pitched its model and chatbot as a more efficient and open-source alternative to US rivals such as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini. The two-year-old company is seen as Europe\u2019s main hope for a homegrown player that can compete in the fast-developing strategic technology.<\/p>\n In contrast, the biggest US tech groups have opted to focus on \u201cclosed\u201d models, preferring to maintain full control of their most advanced technology \u2014 profiting from them through customer subscriptions or enterprise deals. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is pretty much no alternative for Europe now to compete besides open sourcing,\u201d said Lucie-Aim\u00e9e Kaffee, EU policy lead and researcher at open-source start-up Hugging Face. <\/p>\n The release comes as the European Commission has called for greater AI sovereignty in a bid to decrease the bloc\u2019s dependence on foreign technology providers.\u00a0In October, it unveiled a new strategy<\/a> aimed at promoting European AI tools to provide security and resilience while boosting the continent\u2019s industrial competitiveness.<\/p>\n