Mistral 7B, released September 27, 2023 as a bare magnet link on X, was the debut model of the French startup and an instant classic: at 7 billion parameters it outperformed Llama 2 13B across benchmarks, using grouped-query and sliding-window attention to squeeze unprecedented quality from a small dense model. The Apache 2.0 license made it usable anywhere, by anyone.

It became one of the most fine-tuned and deployed open models ever — the default base for local assistants, edge deployments, and countless derivatives — and it established Mistral, then a months-old company, as Europe's frontier lab. The mixture-of-experts Mixtral 8×7B followed just ten weeks later.