The author, Kyle Corbitt, of OpenPipe, a platform for fine-tuning models, announces the release of "Mistral 7B Fine-Tune Optimized", a new model optimized to be the strongest base model for further fine-tunes. This model outperforms other variants in fine-tuning tasks, with two of its variants, Hermes Neural and Metamath Cybertron Starling, being among the best-performing models overall despite not being directly fine-tuned. The author explains that this is due to a phenomenon called model merging, where combining weights from different models can produce stronger results. The new model has been tested on various tasks and datasets, including those of GPT-4, and shows promising results, with one variant slightly outperforming GPT-4 in some cases.