Some races are over before they really get going. So it can seem in the contest to make the best large language models (llms). These algorithms power generative artificial intelligence that can produce humanlike text and other output. Openai, the American creator of Chatgpt, appears leagues ahead. It has made the world’s most powerful llm, called gpt-4. The company is gobbling up talent, data and computing power to build cleverer models. As a result, it attracts more users, and with them more capital to pour into even more sophisticated models.
But a French startup called Mistral is trying to throw a spanner in this ai flywheel. On February 26th it released a new llm. The model, called Mistral-Large, is smaller than gpt-4, measured by the number of parameters it uses (a common gauge of model power). Even so, it nearly rivals gpt-4 in important aspects of performance, such as reasoning. Mistral also unveiled a Mistral-Large-powered Chatgpt competitor, Le Chat (pronounced le shah, like the French word for cat rather than the English homograph).
