In recent weeks, the AI world has been shaken by the "battle" between OpenAI and DeepSeek—a modern-day David vs. Goliath showdown in which the Chinese startup has sent shockwaves through giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta. With media attention focused on DeepSeek’s impressive main debut, its financial market impact, regulatory compliance, and data handling, a significant release from Mistral has gone almost unnoticed.

The French startup may be small and might not capture the same level of public attention, but its new model, Small 3, represents a potential breakthrough in the world of large language models, especially in EU. It is a lightweight, fully open-source model, capable of running locally while maintaining high intelligence and quality, both in reasoning and conversational abilities. In many ways, it could stand as Europe’s alternative to American and Chinese AI giants.

As part of a team working on AI initiatives for public administrations, we need to prioritise key aspects such as linguistic quality, privacy protection, GDPR compliance, and transparency in AI usage. We seek reliable models capable of managing uncertainty while ensuring high effectiveness in reasoning and text generation.

After more than 12 months of monitoring, our initial benchmarks with Small 3 are showing promising results across multiple evaluation criteria. Mistral’s model proves to be a strong competitor against much larger alternatives, offering an open-source approach with the ability to operate seamlessly on local devices. This ensures greater technological independence while mitigating risks related to vendor lock-in or data harvesting.

Are we perhaps overlooking the first noteworthy European AI model while everyone is distracted by the OpenAI vs. DeepSeek rivalry? Mistral Small 3 could very well be Europe’s first real response in the AI race.

What about you? Have you tested Mistral Small 3 yet? Could it truly be the first European alternative to American and Chinese giants?

Give it a try: https://deepinfra.com/mistralai/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501