In a beguiling revelation reminiscent of a fine sonnet, French AI startup Mistral hath declared with great pomp and circumstance that ’tis incorporating a half-dozen new features and capabilities into its free generative AI work assistant, christened le Chat (a translation most feline – “the cat”), that will place the open-source chatbot on par with the leading frontier models from the esteemed houses of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Le Chat, in its newfound glory, hath acquired the ability to scour the vast expanse of the web and provide cited sources, a feat akin to the offerings of Perplexity and SearchGPT. Moreover, Mistral’s chatbot now doth proffer a Canvas feature reminiscent of Claude’s Artifacts, in which users may tamper and tinker with content and code. And lo, le Chat hath attained the power to conjure images through an integration with Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro, the selfsame image generator that doth empower Grok-2’s capabilities.
Canvas: An Ode to Creativity
Beyond such wondrous marvels, le Chat hath now been endowed with the capacity to analyze and distill the essence of large PDF files, encompassing all graphs and equations within. The company, in their wisdom, hath introduced AI “agents” afore the illustrious OpenAI, designed to automate workflows and be shared among the acolytes of a corporation.
Many of these marvels owe their existence to Mistral’s latest creation, the 128B-parameter Pixtral Large. Rising from the ashes of Mistral Large 2, this frontier model offereth a 128k prompt window and excelleth in a multitude of industry benchmarks, such as MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2. “Above all, Pixtral Large doth possess the rare ability to comprehend documents, charts, and natural images,” declared the company in a missive fit for a royal scroll. Additionally, Mistral hath revealed a fresh iteration of its flagship Mistral Large model. Version 24.11 is said to excel in tasks requiring copious amounts of context, like the intricate analysis of documents.
“Forsooth, at Mistral, our path diverges from the herd – we seek not the elusive artificial general intelligence at any cost; rather, we aimeth to place frontier AI in thy noble hands, so thou may decide the fate of these advanced capabilities,” the company proclaimed. Such a vision hath allowed Mistral to be frugal with its treasure, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at prices most modest. Thus, the features unveiled on this auspicious day are available gratis to all le Chat users.
Established in the annals of April 2024 by former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind denizens, Mistral hath grown in worth to a sum of $2 billion, distributing nearly a dozen AI models for commercial and scholarly pursuits. Three of these models – Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B – are open to the public through Hugging Face. Conversely, the Mistral Small, Medium, and Large models art concealed, retrievable solely through the Mistral API. Both Large 24.11 and Pixtral Large may be accessed with either a commercial use license or a more restricted research license from Mistral.)
