Core Viewpoint - Mistral, a prominent AI company, is accused of distilling its latest model from DeepSeek, misrepresenting it as a successful reinforcement learning case while distorting benchmark test results [3][21]. Group 1: Company Background - Mistral is recognized as the European version of OpenAI and has gained a strong reputation in the open-source AI community [4][5]. - Founded in 2023 in Paris, Mistral was established by former Google DeepMind and Meta employees [24]. - The company has maintained an open-source approach, releasing models like Mistral Small and Mistral Code, which are competitive in multilingual processing and reasoning capabilities [27]. Group 2: Recent Developments - A recent Twitter leak from a former employee revealed that Mistral's model, Mistral-small-3.2, shows a high similarity to DeepSeek-v3, suggesting possible distillation [12][19]. - The leak indicates that Mistral may have concealed this fact, misleading the public about the effectiveness of its model [21]. - Mistral's valuation reached $10 billion in August 2023, with ongoing fundraising efforts [25]. Group 3: Controversy and Community Reaction - The allegations have sparked controversy, particularly due to Mistral's significant standing in the open-source AI sector [24]. - Many in the community argue that distilled models should be transparently labeled to maintain integrity [22]. - As of now, Mistral has not publicly responded to these allegations, despite recently launching a new model, Mistral Medium V3.1 [29].