You may have never heard of Mistral AI. But recently, you’ve been seeing the AI startup all over your news feed. Indeed, last week, Mistral announced a partnership with Microsoft, an integration with Amazon Bedrock and even released its latest AI models.
If you are wondering what the company has to offer? How can you take advantage of its models? Read on.
What is Mistral AI?
Mistral AI is a French startup specializing in artificial intelligence. Co-founded by Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, former Meta employees, and Arthur Mensch, former DeepMind researcher, the company is relatively new.
It was launched in April 2023.
What does Mistral AI offer?
Mistral AI has developed and released several AI models for different needs, with both commercial and open models.
Its open AI models, which are available for free licensing, include:
- Its original Mistral 7B transformer model
- Its original smaller model that speaks fluent English with an 8K content window
- Its highest performing open model, Mixtral 8x7B with a 32K context window that speaks English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and code fluently
Its commercial models, Mistral Small, Mistral Embed and Mistral Large, which were just added this week, meet different needs and vary in cost and workload capabilities.
- Mistral Small and Mistral Large are fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Code and have a 32,000 token pop-up.
- Mistral Embed is currently only available in English and is designed for extracting representations from text snippets.
This week, Mistral also unveiled Le Chat, its chatbot available for free in beta. The chatbot can use Mistral Large, Mistral Small or Mistral Next, a prototype model, which users can switch between. Mistral AI warns that it does not have access to the internet. To access it, simply sign up for the beta version.
How can I access Mistral AI offers?
You can access Mistral AI’s open and optimized models via its website. It should be noted that these models are aimed at developers since they are intended to be integrated into building your own AI applications.
So, despite their advanced skills, if you are hoping to access an AI tool like ChatGPT, these models are not for you. Compared to OpenAI’s offerings, this would be more like accessing its APIs.
Mistral AI has, however, launched its own chatbot in beta: Le Chat. The chatbot works similarly to ChatGPT, as a conversational assistant capable of providing useful answers to many questions. The chatbot stands out for being multilingual and capable of understanding different languages, including English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, making it more accessible to the general public.
How do Mistral AI’s models compare to those of OpenAI and other competitors?
On Monday, Mistral unveiled its latest, greatest and largest text generation model, Mistral Large. During the model presentation, Mistral AI said that it performed almost as well as the GPT-4 model in several benchmark tests, and outperformed other leading language models such as Claude 2, Gemini Pro , GPT 3.5 and LLamA 2 70B, as shown in the image below.
Mistral Large is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, while GPT-4 only understands English, another factor that sets it apart and makes it a strong competitor to the OpenAI’s most successful model which, until now, has remained largely undefeated.
Who does Mistral AI partner with?
Microsoft recently announced a multi-year partnership with Mistral AI. In the announcement, Microsoft did not reveal the amount of the partnership. However, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft revealed that the investment was worth $16.3 million. This investment is all the more remarkable since Microsoft has also invested a significant amount in OpenAI, which would amount to $10 billion over several years.
Although not a partnership, it is worth noting that Amazon has announced that Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B will soon be available on Amazon Bedrock.
Source: “ZDNet.com”