Glossary
Mistral
A French open-weight model family from Mistral AI, released mostly under Apache 2.0 with strong performance per parameter and notable MoE variants (Mixtral, Mixtral 8x22B).
The French open weightsweightsA model release that publishes the trained parameters under some downloadable license, distinct from "open source" which (per OSAID) also requires data and training-code openness.
Open full entry contender. Mistral AI launched in 2023 with the
7B-parameter base model under Apache 2.0governanceA permissive open-source license used by most open-weight model releases (Llama from 4 onward partial, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Falcon), allowing commercial use without acceptable-use restrictions.
Open full entry , followed by Mixtral 8x7B
(the first widely-used open mixture of expertsweightsA model architecture where each token activates only a fraction of total parameters by routing through learned expert subnetworks, decoupling capacity from compute.
Open full entry ) and MixtralweightsMistral AI's MoE model line, with Mixtral 8x7B (the first widely-adopted open mixture-of-experts model) and the larger Mixtral 8x22B as its two flagship releases.
Open full entry 8x22B. Later models
(Codestral, Mistral Large, Pixtral) span code, multimodal, and
frontierweightsThe current capability envelope of AI, defined by the most capable models in deployment at any given time; an evolving label rather than a fixed threshold.
Open full entry -class workloads with varied license terms.
Mistral’s license posture is more permissive than Meta’s: most base weights are Apache 2.0governanceA permissive open-source license used by most open-weight model releases (Llama from 4 onward partial, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Falcon), allowing commercial use without acceptable-use restrictions. Open full entry with no MAUgovernanceA user-count metric used in restrictive open-weights licenses (notably Llama's Community License) to trigger a requirement to negotiate a separate commercial license at scale. Open full entry cap or acceptable-usegovernanceLicense or terms-of-service clauses that prohibit certain uses (weapons, surveillance, harassment, child sexual abuse material), common on open-weight licenses but rejected by the strict open-source definition. Open full entry . The newer flagship models have moved toward commercial licensing, narrowing the open part of the catalog over time.
Full coverage at /projects/mistral.