---
id: "2023-12-11-mixtral"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-12-11-mixtral/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2023-12-11"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-12-11-mixtral/

# Mistral AI releases Mixtral 8x7B, an open mixture-of-experts model

Paris-based Mistral AI released Mixtral 8x7B under Apache 2.0, a sparse mixture-of-experts model that matched or beat Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 on many benchmarks while using ~13B active parameters per token.

## Key facts
- Announced 11 December 2023 (weights shared via torrent days earlier)
- 46.7B total parameters, ~12.9B active per token
- Apache 2.0 license
- Paper: arXiv 2401.04088

## What happened

Mistral published a high-quality open-weights sparse MoE model with a fully permissive license.

## Why it matters

Popularized mixture-of-experts in open models (later used by DeepSeek-V3, Llama 4, Qwen) and established Europe's leading AI startup.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Mixtral of experts (Mistral AI)](https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts) (mistral.ai, official)
2. [Mixtral of Experts (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04088) (arxiv.org, paper)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2024-12-26: [DeepSeek-V3: frontier-level open model trained for ~$5.6M in GPU time](https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-12-26-deepseek-v3/index.md)
- 2023-07-18: [Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-07-18-llama-2/index.md)