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Mistral AI: Your New Robot Overlords (But Hopefully the Helpful Kind with Great Dance Moves)
Inside the French AI Company That's Making Waves (and Maybe Soon Folding Your Laundry)
Shark Story
June 16, 2024
Introduction🌐
Hey AI enthusiasts, get ready for a newsletter that's more exciting than a robot uprising (don't worry, they're still taking orders for pizza)! Today, we dive into the world of Mistral AI, a company that's pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence further than a toddler with a crayon and a wall. Let's see what makes them tick, and maybe even learn something before our robot overlords arrive... hopefully with better taste in art. Grab your favourite beverage, sit back, and prepare to be amazed by a company that’s not just riding the AI wave but creating tsunamis with their advanced models and innovative approaches!
Company Overview📈
Mistral AI, a hot new French company founded by AI experts, is shaking things up. They build powerful, customizable AI models and, unlike most, share the code for free! This open-source approach could make advanced AI more accessible for everyone. Founded in 2023, they're already valued nearly $6 billion after raising €600 million, or around $640 million in funding – watch this space!
Year founded: 2023
Location: Paris, France
Company Size: 20+ employees
Funding: $1.1 billion
Recent Developments(in financial terms💰)
Mistral AI recently bagged a staggering $1.1 billion in funding – yes, billion with a "B" – and they’re not using it to buy yachts or golden toilet seats. Nope, they’re pumping it into their research and development like a mad scientist on a caffeine binge. Hold onto your hats, because Mistral AI is about to take us on a wild ride through the future of technology!
Recent Developments (in Partnership )
Mistral AI isn't playing the lone wolf game. They've been busy collecting tech giant sidekicks like Pokémon – gotta catch 'em all! Over the past few months, they've snagged partnerships with several big names.
Mistral AI isn't flying solo – Microsoft snagged a piece of the pie (and a juicy distribution deal) to bring Mistral's AI models to Azure. Let's just say they're not leaving all the robot smarts to the Europeans.
Mistral AI isn't stopping at catching Pokémon, they're evolving! This month, they teamed up with SAP to bring their fancy AI models to the enterprise world. Sounds like even spreadsheets are getting a taste of the future.
May the fourth (be with you), but for Mistral AI, it was May the partnership be with IBM! These two AI giants joined forces, with IBM offering Mistral's commercial models on their watsonx platform. Looks like even supercomputers need a good wingman sometimes. Plus, they're planning to team up on open-source projects – gonna be a real brainy rumble in the jungle!
Technological Advancements
Open source models
Mistral AI committed to empower the AI community with open technology. Mistral open models set the bar for efficiency, and are available for free under Apache 2.0, a fully permissive license, that allows the use of models anywhere without any restriction.
Mistral 7B
Mistral AI very first. A 7B transformer model, fast-deployed and easily customizable. Small, yet very powerful for a variety of use cases.
Performant in English and code
32k context window
Mistral 8x7B
A 7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE). Uses 12.9B active parameters out of 45B total.
Fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and strong in code
32k context window
Mistral 8x22B
Mistral 8x22B is currently the most performant open model. A 22B sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE). Uses only 39B active parameters out of 141B.
Fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and strong in code
64k context window
Native function calling capacities
Function calling and json mode available on our API endpoint
Optimized models
Mistral AI optimized commercial models are designed for performance and are available via our flexible deployment options.
Mistral Small
Cost-efficient reasoning for low-latency workloads.
Fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and strong in code
Context window of 32k tokens, with excellent recall for retrieval augmentation
Native function calling capacities, JSON outputs
Concise, useful, unopinionated, and fully modular
Mistral Large
Top-tier reasoning for high-complexity tasks. The most powerful model of the Mistral AI family.
Fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and strong in code
Context window of 32k tokens, with excellent recall for retrieval augmentation
Native function calling capacities, JSON outputs
Concise, useful, unopinionated, and fully modular
Mistral Embed
State-of-the-art semantics for extracting representation of text extracts.
English only for now
Achieves a retrieval score of 55.26 on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB)
Codestral
Codestral 22B
State-of-the-art Mistral model trained specifically for code tasks.
Trained on 80+ programming languages (incl. Python, Java, C, C++, PHP, Bash)
Optimized for low latency: Way smaller than competitive coding models
Base version (for code completion and generation) via La Plateforme as well as through our partners and Instruct version via Le Chat
Context window of 32k
Available under Mistral AI Non-Production License
Pareto-optimal Apache models
Mistral AI constantly innovates to provide the most capable and efficient models.
They build models that are highly efficient
They build models that offer unparalleled cost efficiency for their respective sizes, delivering the best performance-to-cost ratio available on the market. Mistral 8x22B is the most powerful open source model with significantly fewer parameters than its competition:
Much faster and performant than any 70B model
Outperforms Command R+ by being more than 2.5 times smaller
Mistral 8x7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference
Under Apache 2.0
Their open models are truly open source, licensed under Apache 2.0, a fully permissive license that allows for unrestricted use in any context.
Cost vs Performance
Big Question:-
Is Mistral AI Free?
Mistral AI isn't just about building fancy AI models, they're handing out the blueprints to everyone! Their open-source models are like the Beyonce of efficiency, anyone can use them for free, no questions asked. That's right, it's an Apache 2.0 party – all you need is your dancing shoes (and maybe some coding skills).
Product and Services
Mistral AI caters to both fancy schmancies and budget-conscious robots. You can snag their high-powered AI models with a pay-as-you-go plan, or grab the open-source versions for free – it's like an AI buffet! This flexible approach lets businesses and developers sprinkle some AI magic into their projects, no matter the size of their wallet. Get ready for a wave of innovation across industries, from self-driving pizza delivery to chatbots that finally understand your sarcasm.
Market Impact
Disruption in the AI Industry
Setting New Standards: The efficiency and performance of Mistral AI's models challenge the existing norms in the AI market.
Potential for Broad Application: The technology's versatility opens up a wide range of potential applications, from big data analytics to real-time language processing.
Long-term Growth Prospects
Expanding Market Reach: With its current momentum, Mistral AI is well-positioned to expand its market reach and influence.
Future Development: Continued innovation and development will be key to maintaining its competitive edge.
Future Outlook
Mistral AI isn't showing any signs of slowing down – they're like a rocket prepped for launch! With a wad of cash and a brain full of AI ideas, they're expected to crank out even more impressive models and become a major player in the robot revolution. Plus, their open-source focus means the future of AI might be less "Mad Scientist in the Lab" and more "AI Barn Raising" – a collaborative effort for the greater good (of robot-kind, at least).
Competition
While companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google develop “proprietary” models — i.e. owned and controlled by the entity, with access restricted —, Mistral AI develops “open” models — i.e. all of the company’s models are accessible to the public for free and distributed through an open-source license.
Traction
Mistral AI’s revenue as of April 2024 is unknown; however, in a January 2024 interview, CFO Florian Bressand highlighted the company had entered “hyper-growth”, noting significant customer segments in financial services, banking, insurance, telecommunications, and utilities.
One way to determine the success of Mistral AI’s products, at least its open models, is through the number of downloads on Hugging Face. The Mistral 7B model had been downloaded 2.1 million times as of December 2023. The Mistral 8x7B model had been downloaded 337K times as of January 2024.
Conclusion
Forget boring robots that just vacuum your house – Mistral AI is the cool kid at the AI party. They've got the brains (fancy AI models), the charm (strategic market positioning), and the cash (serious funding) to make waves. While the whole AI world is still figuring things out, Mistral's all about efficiency, performance, and sharing the knowledge (open-source tech!). Basically, they're the AI company to keep an eye on. If they can keep adapting and growing, they might just become the leader of the robot pack – though hopefully they'll be benevolent robot overlords, not the scary kind from the movies.