French AI startup Mistral has unveiled Forge, a platform for building custom AI models for enterprises, TechCrunch reported on March 17 local time.

Announced at Nvidia's annual technology conference GTC, the platform supports companies training AI models from scratch using their own data. Mistral's head of product Elisa Salamanca (엘리사 살라만카) said, "Forge enables enterprises and governments to customise AI models to their specific needs."

Most existing enterprise AI companies have stopped at fine-tuning existing models or using internal data via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), rather than retraining models.

Mistral said it chose to train models from scratch through Forge. It said the approach can better handle non-English data or specialised data in specific fields, and can also be used to build agent systems using reinforcement learning.

It added that the platform can reduce reliance on third-party model providers and lower risks tied to model changes or service shutdowns.

Forge customers can build custom models using Mistral's library of open-weight AI models. They can also use smaller models such as the recently launched Mistral Small 4. Mistral co-founder and chief technology officer Timothee Lacroix (티모테 라크루아) said, "Small models have the limitation that they cannot perform as well as large models across all areas. With customisation, you can choose what to emphasise and what to give up."