Artificial intelligence startup based in Paris Mistral AI gradually builds an alternative OpenAI and Humane as his latest announcement shows. The company is launching a new flagship model of large tongues called Mistral Large. It is designed to compete with other top tier models in reasoning capabilities such as GPT-4 and Claude 2.
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.
If you’re not familiar with Mistral AI, the company is best known for its market cap, having raised an obscene amount of money in a very short amount of time to develop basic AI models. The company was officially founded in May 2023. Just a few weeks after that, Mistral AI raised a $112 million seed round. In December, the company closed a $415 million funding round with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the round.
Founded by alums from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI was initially positioned as an AI company with an open source focus. While the first model of the Mistral AI was released under the Apache 2.0 open source license, this is not the case for its larger models.
Mistral AI’s business model is increasingly similar to OpenAI’s as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API and usage-based pricing. It currently costs $8 per million tokens to enter and $24 per million tokens to exit to query Mistral Large.
By default, Mistral AI supports context windows with 32k tokens. It supports English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
For comparison, GPT-4 with a 32k-token context window currently costs $60 per million input tokens and $120 per million output tokens. So Mistral Large is currently 5 to 7.5 times cheaper than GPT-4-32k. Things change at a fast pace and AI companies update their prices regularly.
Image Credits: Mistral AI
But how does the Mistral Large measure up to the GPT-4 and Claude 2? As always, it’s very hard to say. Mistral AI claims to be second only to GPT-4 on several benchmarks. However, there may be some cherry-picking benchmarks and differences in real-life usage. We’ll have to dig further to see how it performs in our tests.
An alternative to ChatGPT
Mistral AI is also launching a chat assistant today called Le Chat. Anyone can sign up and try it out chat.mistral.ai. The company says it’s a beta version for now and there may be “quirks”.
While access to the service is free (for now), users can choose between three different models — Mistral Small, Mistral Large, and an original model designed to be short and concise called Mistral Next.
The company also plans to release a paid version of Le Chat for enterprise customers. In addition to central billing, enterprise customers will be able to define oversight mechanisms.
Partnership with Microsoft
Finally, Mistral AI is also using today’s update to announce a partnership with Microsoft. In addition to its own Mistral API platform, Microsoft is going to provides Mistral models to Azure customers.
It’s another model in the Azure model catalog, which doesn’t seem that big. And yet, it also means that Mistral AI and Microsoft are now in talks about partnership opportunities and potentially more. The first benefit of this partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
As for Microsoft, the company is the lead investor in OpenAI’s cap-and-trade subsidiary. But it has also welcomed other AI models to its cloud computing platform. For example, Microsoft and Meta partner to deliver large Llama language models to Azure.
This open collaboration strategy is a nice way to keep Azure customers in its product ecosystem. It can also help when it comes to anticompetitive scrutiny.
