Mistral, the French AI company and champion of “open weights,” released a new family of AI models Tuesday whose most interesting feature is how small they are: lean enough to run on smartphones.
“The bottom line is that we managed to squeeze much more performance into a small number of parameters,” Mistral Co-founder Guillaume Lample told Semafor.
Its smallest new model, Ministral3 3B, is three billion parameters — tiny by large language model standards, which can run in the trillions — and the company says it can outperform some models four times its size.
We’ve only scratched the surface on how the new crop of small AI models can be used on local hardware — with no internet connection necessary. These models offer an opportunity to revive the consumer gadget space by leveraging off-the-shelf hardware and free, open AI models.