Comparing AI models — who builds what and how to choose
The major model families in 2026 at a glance. Who builds Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen — and which model to pick when.
Martin Rau
Mistral
in AI Models
Models from Mistral AI (France) — a mix of open and proprietary lines: general language models, the Codestral code model, the Magistral reasoning line, and multimodal Pixtral.
Glossary
Codestral Mistral
Codestral is Mistral AI's code-specialized model (first released May 2024) — a 22B-parameter model for code completion and generation, originally published as open weights.
Magistral Mistral
Magistral is Mistral AIs first reasoning model from June 2025 — with a transparent, verifiable chain of thought and strength in European languages, partly as open weights.
Pixtral Mistral
Mistral AI's first multimodal model, released in September 2024 under Apache 2.0. A vision-language model with 12B parameters plus a 400M vision encoder, processing text and (multiple) images; 128K context, open weights via Hugging Face.
Devstral Mistral
Devstral is Mistral AI's open agentic model for software engineering (May 2025) — trained to solve real GitHub issues and strong on SWE-bench Verified.
Mistral 7B Mistral
Mistral 7B (September 2023) is Mistral AIs first open-weight model — a 7.3B-parameter model under Apache 2.0 that at the time outperformed the larger Llama 2 13B on benchmarks.
Mistral Large 3 Mistral
Mistral Large 3 (December 2025) is Mistral's open-weight MoE flagship — 675B parameters, 256K-token context, natively multimodal, Apache 2.0.
Mistral Medium 3 Mistral
Mistral Medium 3 is a proprietary AI model from Mistral AI released in May 2025. As an enterprise model built for high performance at low operating cost, it offers around 128,000 tokens of context and can also be run on-premise or in your own VPC.
Mistral Small 4 Mistral
Mistral Small 4 is Mistral AI's open-weight MoE model from March 2026 — merging reasoning, vision and coding into one model, 119B parameters (6.5B active), Apache 2.0.
Mixtral 8x7B Mistral
Mixtral 8x7B (December 2023) is Mistral AIs open Sparse-MoE model with 8 experts — 46.7B parameters, 12.9B active per token, 32K context, Apache 2.0 license.
Encyclopedia
LLM Model Families at a Glance
Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama & co. — who builds what, where each family shines, and how to pick the right model for your own use case.
Martin Rau
Codestral — Mistral's code model line explained
Codestral is Mistral AI's code specialist: autocomplete, function generation, fill-in-the-middle. What the line is for, how it differs, when to pick it.
Martin Rau
Magistral — Mistral's reasoning line explained
Magistral is Mistral AI's reasoning line: a transparent chain of thought, strong in European languages, partly open weights. When to pick it.
Martin Rau
News
Mistral raises €722M and starts building its own AI data center
Mistral funds a dedicated AI data center near Paris. Target: 200 MW of European compute capacity by end of 2027 for sovereign AI.
Redaktion
Mistral Large 3: Europe's frontier model with open weights
675B total params, 41B active, Apache 2.0. Mistral Large 3 is the first true European frontier model with fully open weights.
Redaktion
Mistral Medium 3.5: coding agents move to the cloud
Mistral ships Medium 3.5 at 77.6% SWE-Bench plus remote agents in Vibe and Le Chat. Local sessions can be teleported into the cloud.
Redaktion