Mistral AI released its first model, Mistral 7B. At 7 billion parameters it was said to beat Llama 2 13B across every benchmark tested and Llama 1 34B on many of them, and it shipped under Apache 2.0, with no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution — a looser arrangement than Meta's conditional licence, and much of the point. The release came as a magnet link to a 13.4GB torrent posted on X rather than as a blog post or a paper. It was not open source in the full sense: the training data and the base weights stayed private and the work was done on private money, and Mensch said at the time that not every future model would be Apache 2.0. Five months after being founded, the company had shown its thesis: small models, strong results, given away on permissive terms.