French founder of artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch, attends the Viva Technology show at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles in Paris, France, on May 22, 2024.
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French artificial intelligence firm Mistral is on Tuesday launching its first reasoning model to compete with rival options from the likes of OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.
The startup, which is backed by U.S. tech giant Microsoft, on Tuesday said that it plans to release its own reasoning model Magistral, which is “competitive with all the others,” including OpenAI’s o1 and Chinese AI firm DeepSeek’s R1, according to CEO Arthur Mensch.
Reasoning models are systems that can execute more complicated tasks through a step-by-step logical thought process. Mistral’s new model “is great at mathematics [and] great at coding,” Mensch told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal onstage during a fireside chat at London Tech Week.
The Mistral boss said that the unique selling point of the company’s upcoming Magistral reasoning model is that it’ll be able to reason with European languages.
“Historically, we’ve seen U.S. models reason in English and Chinese models reason in Chinese,” Mensch said.
At the start of this year, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released a reasoning model called R1 that shocked the AI community — and global markets — promising competitive performance with OpenAI’s rival o1 model at a lower cost.
This breaking news story is being updated.