OpenAI Delays Model as Mistral Rises in AI reasoning Race
OpenAI’s much-anticipated open-weights language model, originally planned for early summer 2025, has been delayed until later this summer. CEO Sam Altman announced the delay on June 10, citing an “unexpected and quite amazing” breakthrough that requires more time to integrate AI reasoning. He assured users the result will be “very very worth it.” The upcoming model aims to surpass existing open AI reasoning models, including DeepSeek’s R1.
OpenAI’s Strategic Pivot Toward AI Reasoning
OpenAI’s March 2025 commitment to releasing an open-weight model marked a major shift, having held back since GPT-2 in 2019. The move comes amid rising pressure from competitors like Meta and DeepSeek, and growing demands for greater transparency in AI development. OpenAI’s upcoming model is designed for robust AI reasonig, following recent strides by its o3 system.
The o3 model scored 75.7% on the ARC-AGI-Pub benchmark, signaling what many call a qualitative leap in AI’s ability to generalize across tasks. Its autonomous identification of complex security flaws further highlights OpenAI’s lead in high-stakes, real-world AI applications.
Mistral’s Magistral Brings European Strength to AI Reasoning
French startup Mistral AI raised the bar in AI reasoning with the debut of Magistral, offered in two forms:
- Magistral Small (24B parameter, open-source under Apache 2.0)
- Magistral Medium (enterprise-grade via API and Le Chat platform)
Magistral is purpose-built for transparent, multilingual AI reasonig in areas like structured logic and rule-based decision-making. It supports English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.
On the AIME2024 benchmark, Magistral Medium scored 73.6% (90% with majority voting), while Magistral Small earned 70.7% (83.3% with voting). While these scores are strong, they trail behind OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini Pro 2.5.
Magistral’s dual-release approach and features like “Think Mode” and “Flash Answers” promise up to 10x faster responses—escalating the AI reasoning arms race.
Innovation Race and the Future of AI Reasoning
OpenAI’s model delay reflects the shifting dynamics of the AI reasonig landscape. Its o3 model’s breakthroughs hint at a paradigm shift, while Mistral’s transparent, multilingual innovation proves Europe is rapidly becoming a major force in this domain.
As OpenAI refines its model and Mistral scales its offerings, the world inches closer to a new generation of AI—one capable of real-time, human-like reasoning across languages, tasks, and contexts.
