Mistral AI Breaks the Mold: Releases Torrent Link for New Open Source LLM

In a bold move, open source model startup Mistral AI has released a new large language model (LLM) today, providing only a torrent link for access. This starkly contrasts with Google’s Gemini launch this week, which OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy described as “an over-rehearsed professional release video discussing a revolution in AI.”

One of Google’s demo videos has faced heavy criticism for being overly edited and staged to showcase capabilities. In contrast, Mistral opted for a straightforward approach by sharing a link to download their new model, named Mixtral 8x7B.

A Reddit post characterized Mistral’s LLM as a “scaled-down GPT-4,” describing it as a mixture of experts model (MoE) with 8 experts, each with 7 billion parameters. The post notes that for the inference of each token, only 2 experts are activated, and speculates that GPT-4 may also be a MoE model featuring 8 experts, each with 111 billion parameters and 55 billion shared attention parameters, totaling 166 billion parameters per model.

Uri Eliabayev, an AI consultant and founder of the "Machine & Deep Learning Israel" community, highlighted Mistral's reputation for such releases—“without any paper, blog, code, or press release.” Open source AI advocate Jay Scambler echoed this sentiment, noting that while the release was “definitely unusual,” it succeeded in generating significant buzz.

This guerrilla marketing strategy has been widely celebrated in the AI community. Entrepreneur George Hotz remarked on the release, while Eric Jang, Vice President of AI at 1X Technologies and former Google robotics researcher, expressed enthusiasm for Mistral’s brand, calling it “one of my favorites in the AI space.”

Paris-based Mistral AI has recently achieved a $2 billion valuation in a major funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It is already recognized for its record-setting $118 million seed round—the largest in European history—and its initial large language AI model, Mistral 7B, launched last September. The company is also at the forefront of discussions regarding the EU AI Act, reportedly lobbying for reduced regulations on open source AI.