The open-source AI landscape is gaining a significant new contender. Mistral AI has announced Mistral 3, its next-generation family of models, headlined by a powerful large model and a series of smaller, efficient options—all released under a permissive open license.

This release emphasizes both high performance for complex tasks and practical efficiency for widespread deployment, continuing the company's commitment to open-source development.

A Two-Tiered Approach for Different Needs

The Mistral 3 family is designed to cater to a wide range of applications, from data center workloads to local device deployment.

· Mistral Large 3: Positioned as the flagship, this is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 675 billion total parameters. Mistral claims it achieves competitive performance with leading open-source instruction-tuned models and excels in multilingual conversations beyond English and Chinese.

· The Ministral 3 Series: This group includes three smaller, dense models (3B, 8B, and 14B parameters) intended for use on personal devices or at the network edge. These models are highlighted for their favorable balance of performance and operational cost, offering multimodal and multilingual understanding in a compact form.

Open Access and Broad Availability

True to its open-source ethos, Mistral is releasing the base and instruction-tuned versions of these models under the Apache 2.0 license. This allows developers and researchers extensive freedom to use, modify, and distribute the technology.

To ensure the models are accessible, Mistral has collaborated with partners including NVIDIA, vLLM, and Red Hat to optimize them for efficient operation on various hardware, from cloud servers to consumer laptops.

The models are available immediately through several platforms, including:

· Mistral's own AI Studio

· Major cloud services (Amazon Bedrock, Azure Foundry)

· Developer hubs (Hugging Face, Together AI)

By offering a spectrum of models—from a frontier-scale large model to efficient small models—under an open license, Mistral 3 provides a comprehensive toolkit for the developer community. This move strengthens the ecosystem of transparent, customizable AI and offers clear alternatives to proprietary systems.