This past Monday, the French AI startup Mistral quietly unleashed a technological giant - Mixtral 8x7B, an open-weight LLM (Language Learning Model) with the potential to reshape the AI landscape in Europe and beyond. While the release itself may have been understated, the implications for Europe's AI ambitions are anything but. Let's delve deeper into what makes Mixtral 8x7B so groundbreaking and explore its potential impact on the future of AI development. Think of Mixtral as a top-tier marketing team. Each member of the team is an “expert” in a specific area - one person excels at social media, another at email campaigns, and so on. For every task, the team leader chooses the two best experts for that job. That’s what Mixtral does, but with language tasks!