Software Engineer

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more. European AI powerhouse Mistral today launched Magistral, a new family of large language models (LLMs) that marks the first from the company to enter the increasingly competitive space of “reasoning,” or models that take time to reflect on their thinking to catch errors and solve more complex tasks than basic text-based LLMs. The announcement features a strategic dual release: a powerful, proprietary Magistral Medium for enterprise clients, and, notably, a 24-billion parameter open-source version, Magistral Small.The latter release appears calculated to reinforce the company’s commitment to its foundational roots, following a period where it faced criticism for leaning into more closed, proprietary models such as its Medium 3 for enterprises, launched back in May 2025.A return to open source rootsIn a move that will undoubtedly be celebrated by developers and the wider AI community, Mistral is releasing Magistral Small under the permissive open source Apache 2.0 license.This is a crucial detail. Unlike more restrictive licenses, Apache 2.0 allows anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute the model’s source code, even for commercial purposes. This empowers startups and established companies alike to build and deploy their own applications on top of Mistral’s latest reasoning architecture without licensing fees or fear of vendor lock-in.This open approach is particularly significant given the context

French AI startup Mistral on Tuesday announced it’s launching its first reasoning model to compete take rivals like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.Unlike the other reasoning models, Mistral’s new model will bring something fresh to the table that its competitors don’t have: the ability to think through problems in multiple languages.“We’re announcing in a couple of hours our new reasoning model, which is very much competitive with all the others and has the specificity of being able to reason in multiple languages,” CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC in an interview during a fireside chat at London Tech Week.Mistral is launching its First Reasoning Model to Challenge OpenAI and DeepSeekThe launch puts Mistral head-to-head with some serious competition. OpenAI’s o1 model has been available to ChatGPT users since late last year, while DeepSeek’s R1 represents China’s entry into the reasoning model space. But Mistral thinks it has found a gap in the market.Reasoning models work differently from regular AI chatbots. Instead of just spitting out answers, they work through complex problems step by step, showing their logical thought process. Think of it like watching someone solve a math problem by writing out each step rather than just giving you the final answer.However, Apple’s latest research paper suggests that AI reasoning capabilities may not live up to the hype. The company’s researchers published a paper called “The Illusion of Thinking” that’s shaking up assumptions about these models

This effort is part of the tech giant’s effort to foster trust among its cloud customers as it sells them AI products from companies like OpenAI and xAI, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (June 8). Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of Responsible AI, told the FT the company would soon add a “safety” category to its “model leaderboard,” a feature it created recently for developers to rank iterations from providers including China’s DeepSeek and France’s Mistral. The leaderboard, which is accessible to clients using the Azure Foundry developer platform, is expected to influence which AI models and applications are purchased via Microsoft