Artificial intelligence is doing well in France. In a blog post published this Monday, February 26, 2024, the start-up Mistral AI has in fact unveiled a competing service to ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google: Le Chat.
Chat is an application that allows you to interact with the different Mistral AI models. We designed it as an educational and fun application to evaluate our technology.
Available in beta at the moment, Le Chat can answer various questions via the company’s three language models: Mistral Large, Mistral Next and Mistral Small.
Three variations: Large, Small and Next
The first is the new Mistral AI language model, and also the most advanced. Displaying performance between GPT-4 and Gemini Pro 1.0, Mistral Large has the advantage of supporting multiple languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian and German) and large context windows (32,000 tokens). The AI also boasts expanded compatibility with other tools and precise monitoring of moderation instructions.
It achieves high-level reasoning abilities and can be used for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, particularly in text comprehension and transformation, as well as code generation.
Mistral Small is defined as a model “optimized for latency and cost”, while Mistral Next acts as a prototype “designed to be brief and concise”.
Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, explains to the daily The world that The Cat “is a demonstration of our models”. Please note that some answers may contain errors as the models do not yet have access to the Internet.
Microsoft in the game
Finally, we learn that a partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI has been established, without however assuming a stake in the company. Mistral Large thus becomes available via Microsoft Azure AI alongside OpenAI’s GPT.
Like the partnership with OpenAI, the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral will also focus on the development and deployment of large-scale, next-generation language models.
The end of open source?
Champion of open models available to all, Mistral is making an about-face with its new Large model, which is no longer open source and will be commercialized. However, it is this open source model that has allowed Mistral to achieve dazzling success against OpenAI’s proprietary models.
You can try Le Chat, which is currently freely accessible, by connecting directly to the Mistral AI website.