Mistral releases regional model focused on Arabic language and culture
The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical. On Monday, Paris-based AI startup Mistral — which is vying to rival the likes of U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI — is releasing a model that’s a bit different from its usual LLM.
Named Mistral Saba, the new custom-trained model is designed to address a specific geography: Arabic speaking countries. The goal for Mistral Saba is to excel in Arabic interactions.
Mistral Saba is a relatively small model with 24 billion parameters. As a reminder, fewer parameters generally leads to better performance with lower latency. But more parameters usually means smarter answers, even though it’s not a linear correlation.
Mistral Saba is comparable in size to Mistral Small 3, its general purpose small model. But, according to Mistral’s own tests, Mistral Saba performs much better than Mistral Small 3 when handling Arabic content.