Magistral Review 2026: Mistral Open-Weight Reasoning Model That Beats DeepSeek R1
Magistral is Mistral AI’s first reasoning model family, released in 2025. The 24B open-weight Small variant runs on a single RTX 4090 or 32 GB MacBook, scores 70.7% on AIME-2024 pass@1, and is licensed Apache 2.0 — making it the most capable locally-deployable reasoning model available today. What Is Magistral? Mistral’s First Reasoning Model Explained Magistral is the reasoning model family from Mistral AI, a French AI company founded in 2023. It comes in two variants: Magistral Small, a 24-billion-parameter open-weight model released under Apache 2.0, and Magistral Medium, a larger mixture-of-experts (MoE) model available exclusively via API. Unlike most reasoning models that distill knowledge from proprietary giants like GPT-4o or Claude, Magistral was trained using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) applied directly to the Mistral Medium 3 checkpoint — no distillation from other reasoning models was involved. This means its reasoning chain is genuinely self-developed, not borrowed. Magistral Medium scores 73.6% on AIME-2024 pass@1 — a 50% relative improvement over the base Mistral Medium 3 — and reaches 90% with majority voting at 64 samples. Magistral supports multilingual chain-of-thought reasoning across English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Simplified Chinese, making it the first openly verifiable multilingual reasoning model from a European AI lab. ...