Mistral's free AI model raises questions about how long open models stay free

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In late October, French AI company Mistral released one of the largest AI models ever made as a free download, trained on nearly four thousand NVIDIA chips. The article examines how companies that give away AI models make money, noting that training costs are very high and that Mistral earns revenue from API access, a chat subscription, enterprise deals, and licences for hosting providers. Hosts such as Fireworks profit by running free models on their own hardware and selling access to apps, and the article points out that model licences charge only those who resell the model. Larger firms like Alibaba and Meta, by contrast, earn money from cloud services and advertising rather than model access. The piece also notes that some free models are not free immediately, since Mistral charged for access before the weights were published.

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