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In the equivalent of a mic drop, open source model startup Mistral AI today launched a new LLM with nothing more than a torrent link.
It immediately generated excitement in the community due to the stark contrast with Google Gemini Launch this week, or what OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy called in a post "An over-rehearsed professional launch video that talks about a revolution in AI."
One of Google's demo videos of the launch has been heavily criticized over the past 24 hours by being edited and organized to appear more capable.
Mistral, on the other hand, simply posted this: a link to a large torrent file to download their new model, which is called MoE 8x7B.
A Reddit post described the Mistral LLM as a "reduced GPT-4" that appears to be "an MoE consisting of 8 7B experts." For the inference of each token, only 2 experts are used, the post continued, adding that “from the GPT-4 leaks, we can speculate that GPT-4 is an MoE model with 8 experts, each with 111 thousand million own parameters and 55 billion. Shared attention parameters (166 billion parameters per model). For the inference of each token, only 2 experts are also used.”
Uri Eliabayev, an artificial intelligence consultant and founder of the “Machine & Deep learning Israel” community, told VentureBeat in a message that Mistral was “known” for this type of release, “without any documents, blogs, code or press releases.” . And open source AI advocate Jay Scambler messaged that the release was "definitely unusual, but it's generated quite a bit of buzz, which I think is the point."
The guerrilla action was immediately acclaimed by many members of the AI community. For example, businessman George Hotz posted:
And Eric Jang, vice president of AI, 1X Technologies and former robotics research scientist at Google, posted that the Mistral brand is “already becoming one of my favorites in the AI space.”
Mistral, a Paris-based startup that just achieved a $2 billion valuation in a successful funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, was already well known for its record-breaking $118 million seed round. supposedly the largest seed in the history of Europe - and his first big language AI modelMistral 7B, launched in September.
The company has also been in the center of debate around the EU AI Law, after it was reported be putting pressure on the European Parliament to regulate open source AI less.
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