Mistral’s new reasoning model aims to take on OpenAI’s offerings like o3 and o4-mini, and DeepSeek’s R1.

Microsoft Corp.-backed (MSFT) Mistral AI on Tuesday launched its first reasoning model, Magistral, as it looks to take on industry leader OpenAI.

The French AI startup announced that Magistral is available in both open-source and enterprise versions.

Mistral said Magistral has been purpose-built for transparent reasoning, fine-tuned for multi-step logic. Unlike general-purpose models, the company added that this improves interpretability and provides a traceable thought process in the user’s language.

Mistral also noted that Magistral is good at reasoning across languages like English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. It said Magistral works well across various use cases, from structured calculations and programmatic logic to decision trees and rule-based systems.

The AI startup said it intends to iterate quickly after today’s release of Magistral.

Mistral’s new reasoning model aims to take on OpenAI’s offerings like o3 and o4-mini, as well as DeepSeek’s R1. The company says Magistral’s multi-language prowess sets it apart from rivals.

“Historically, we’ve seen U.S. models reason in English and Chinese models reason in Chinese,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC in an interview.

Reasoning models think before generating an answer to user queries, producing an internal chain-of-thought. This process also allows these models to execute more complicated tasks.

Mistral has raised $1.05 billion so far across six rounds. It counts Microsoft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, a16z, Nvidia, Salesforce, and Samsung, among others, as its investors.

OpenAI, also backed by Microsoft, has raised $57.9 billion across 11 rounds. Some of its other backers include SoftBank Group, Nvidia, and a16z, among others.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT service, meanwhile, was experiencing issues at the time of writing. According to a notice on the company’s status page, OpenAI expects to resolve issues fully over the next few hours.

According to a Reuters report, OpenAI is planning to add rival Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google cloud service to its arsenal to address the increasing computing requirements as its service grows.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a direct rival to Google’s Gemini service.

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