Mistral 7B
A French startup released a seven-billion-parameter model that outperformed ones twice its size, under an Apache licence with no restrictions.
Why it matters
Europe acquired a frontier player of its own, and the first genuinely open weights release without caveats on use.
The company was founded a few months earlier by people from Meta and DeepMind. Unlike Llama 2, the Apache 2.0 licence restricts neither the size of the user nor the field of application. That made Mistral the basis for products where Meta's licence was unacceptable. The arrival of a European player coincided with the passage of European AI regulation.