Key Takeaways:
- French AI startup, Mistral AI, has launched a new large language model, Mistral Large, and a chat assistant, Le Chat. The model is competitively priced, supports multiple languages, and is claimed to rank second after GPT-4.
- Le Chat, currently in beta and free to use, offers users a choice between three models. A paid version with additional features for enterprise clients is in the pipeline.
- Microsoft and Mistral AI have entered a multi-year partnership for AI advancement. The partnership targets supercomputing infrastructure, market scale, and AI research.
French AI startup Mistral AI is making waves in the artificial intelligence industry with the release of its new flagship large language model, Mistral Large, and its own chat assistant, Le Chat. The company, which was founded in May 2023 by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, has quickly gained traction and funding, raising a total of $528 million in less than a year.
Mistral AI’s New Model: Mistral Large
Mistral Large is designed to rival other top-tier models, such as GPT-4 and Claude 2, in terms of reasoning capabilities. The model is available through a paid API with usage-based pricing, costing $8 per million of input tokens and $24 per million of output tokens. This makes it 20% cheaper than the most recent version of GPT called GPT-4 Turbo.
Mistral Large supports English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, and by default, it supports context windows of 32k tokens (generally more than 20,000 words in English). The company claims that Mistral Large ranks second after GPT-4 based on several benchmarks. However, real-life usage and further testing will provide a more accurate comparison.
Le Chat: Mistral AI’s Chat Assistant
In addition to Mistral Large, the startup is also launching its own alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called Le Chat. This chat assistant is currently available in beta and is free to use for now. Users can choose between three different models — Mistral Small, Mistral Large, and a prototype model called Mistral Next, which has been designed to be brief and concise.
Mistral AI also plans to launch a paid version of Le Chat for enterprise clients. In addition to central billing, enterprise clients will be able to define moderation mechanisms.
Partnership with Microsoft
Microsoft and Mistral AI have announced a new multi-year partnership to accelerate AI innovation. The partnership will provide Mistral AI with access to Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure to accelerate the development and deployment of their next-generation large language models (LLMs). The partnership is focused on three core areas: supercomputing infrastructure, scale to market, and AI research and development.
Microsoft is also the main investor of OpenAI’s capped profit subsidiary and has welcomed other AI models on its cloud computing platform, such as Meta’s Llama large language models.
Final Thoughts
Mistral AI is quickly establishing itself as a significant player in the AI industry. With its new model, chat assistant, and partnership with Microsoft, the company is poised to make a significant impact in the coming years.
New to These Terms?
Mistral AI: A startup company founded in 2023 that specializes in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Based in France.
Mistral Large: Mistral AI’s newest large language model that can understand and generate human-like text. Designed to compete with models like GPT-4.
Le Chat: A chatbot assistant developed by Mistral AI uses their natural language AI models. It is available online for users to chat with.
Google’s DeepMind and Meta: DeepMind is Alphabet’s UK AI lab. Meta is the parent company of Facebook. Alumni from both companies founded Mistral AI.
GPT-4 Turbo: GPT-4 Turbo is an upgraded version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model that was announced in November 2023.
Microsoft Azure: A leading public cloud platform by Microsoft, offers comprehensive cloud services like computing, analytics, storage, and networking. It allows organizations to build, manage, and deploy applications across various environments, including cloud, on-site, and edge computing. Azure’s robust infrastructure, a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers, makes it a reliable choice for businesses seeking versatile cloud solutions.
