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Paris-based AI startup Mistral is focusing on providing large language models (LLMs) that understand regional-specific languages and are tailored to grasp the cultural nuances sometimes overlooked in larger, more general-purpose models trained to be versed in multiple languages.
Mistral has released its first "specialized" regional language-focused model, Saba. According to Mistral, the 24-billion-parameter model has been trained on "meticulously curated datasets" from across the Middle East and South Asia to meet a growing customer base in Arabic-speaking countries.
Also: What to know about Mistral AI: The company behind the latest GPT-4 rival
The startup, co-founded by former Meta employees, is attempting to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot with its own AI chatbot -- Le Chat. Mistral has developed and released several LLMs, both commercial and open source, that are accessible through websites, mobile apps, and APIs for third-party applications.
Saba is relatively similar in size to Mistral Small 3, an open-source, general-purpose model comparable to larger models such as Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen 32B, and even GPT4o-mini. However, according to Mistral's metrics, Saba performs better at handling Arabic content than Mistral Small 3 and other LLMs.
The model also excels with South Indian languages like Tamil and Malayalam, according to Mistral, because of "cultural cross-pollination" between the Middle East and South Asia.
Other AI companies are pursuing similar objectives with regional-specific LLMs: OpenAI has developed a Japanese-specific GPT-4 model; the EuroLingua GPT project focuses on European languages; BAAI Beijing open-sourced its Arabic Language Model (ALM) back in 2022; and Nigerian-based Awarri is building its own LLM for low-resource Nigerian languages.
Mistral
According to Mistral's benchmark tests, Saba outperforms Arabic-centric models such as JAIS 70B, and multilingual LLMs such as Mistral Small 3, Llama 3.1 70B, GPT 4o-mini.
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