French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers and businesses fine-tune its production models for specific use cases.
The first is self-service. Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetunefor refining its models on workstations, servers and small data center nodes.
In the readme for the SDK’s GitHub repository, Mistral notes that the SDK is optimized for multi-GPU setups, but can be scaled down to a single Nvidia A100 or H100 GPU to optimize smaller models like the Mistral 7B. Fine-tuning a dataset like UltraChat, a collection of 1.4 million conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, takes about half an hour using Mistral-Finetune on eight H100s, Mistral says.
For developers and companies that prefer a more managed solution, there are Mistral’s newly launched microconfiguration services available through the company’s API. Compatible with two of Mistral’s models for now, the Mistral Small and the aforementioned Mistral 7B, Mistral says the tuning services will gain support for more of its models in the coming weeks.
Finally, Mistral is debuting custom training services, currently available only to select customers, to optimize any Mistral model for an organization’s applications using their data. “This approach allows for the creation of highly specialized and optimized models for their specific domain,” the company explains in a post on the official blog.
Mistral, which my colleague Ingrid Lunden recently reported is seeking to raise about $600 million at a $6 billion valuation from investors including DST, General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners, is no doubt looking to grow revenue as it faces significant – and growing – competition in the productive AI space.
Since Mistral unveiled its first production model in September 2023, it has released several more, including a code generation model, and released a paid API. However, it has not disclosed how many users it has, nor what its revenue is.
