The French company Mistral announced on March 18, 2025 its brand new model, Mistral Small 3.1. On the program: improved performance, better understanding … But a little problem is spoiling the party.
It was on its website that Mistral, a French company specializing in artificial intelligence, shared information. The competitor of Chatgpt, which is struggling to fit among the big names in the market, announced on March 18, 2025 its brand new generative AI model. Called Mistral Small 3.1, it would be faster and more versatile than all its rivals.
Mistral Small 3.1, or the promise of the best
Mistral does not hide it: its Small 3.1 model is designed to be the best. Chatgpt, Claude and the other competitors of the French company only have to stand for, evidenced by the many diagrams displayed on The official websitewhich compare the performance of the different generative AI.
Mistral, in addition to comparing Small 3.1’s performance with its competitors, does not fail to affirm that this “Surpass comparable models like Gemma 3 and GPT-4O Mini, while providing inference speeds of 150 tokens per second”. Whether to understand text, follow the user’s instructions or analyze images, Mistral is held on the podium and does not often occupy third place.
Mistral Small 3.1 is open source, which means that it is available to the public without restrictions. Users can use it for various functions and ensure their security by examining the software code.
A new AI model that is not available for everyone
If Mistral promises faster and versatile performance, Small 3.1 will not be accessible for everyone. The new model of the French company can be downloaded and usable locally, without depending on any server. A way not to go through the cloud and protect your data from your device.
The fact is that Small 3.1 is very greedy in resources. The new Mistral model requires no less than 32 GB of RAM as well as a powerful graphics card, such as RTX 4090. In other words, its potential users are strongly reduced, even if Mistral assured that Small 3.1 could turn on a recent Mac.
Small 3.1 is already available for download from the website of Hugging Face. Mistral also leaves the possibility of browsing its new IA tool as an optional cloud, without having to install it locally. In order to take advantage of it, just chat with the catavailable for free on the internet.