Mistral is a French AI start-up founded in 2023 by ex-Google and Meta engineers. It has quickly grown to be a notable player in the industry, especially with the release of its Mistral Large in February 2024. Given the relatively small investments it has received to date, Mistral has achieved an impressive feat and proven to be a potential contender.
The French government has always touted Mistral as a proud home-grown AI start-up and a European AI force independent of US tech giants. Mistral was believed to be closely aligned with European regulations and, therefore, more suitable for tight EU AI regulations for clients such as European governments.
In February 2024, Mistral announced an agreement with Microsoft to become available on Azure and will use Microsoft’s cloud resources for further development. This pivot to its perceived European roots, which happened at a sensitive time when the EU was investigating OpenAI and Microsoft’s partnership, caused debates among European regulators. The deal is to be invested by the European Commission.
Apart from Azure, Mistral models are available through its La Plateforme and Le Chat, which are equivalent to OpenAI APIs and ChatGPT. Mistral’s main offerings are Mistral Small, Mistral Large, and Mistral Embed. The company also released two open models, Mistral 7B and Mistral 8x7B, under the Apache 2.0 License.
Mistral Large
As Mistral’s top-tier model, Large excels in many multi-task language understanding tests, making it the second-best model (only slightly behind GPT-4) for complex language tasks. It also performed reasonably well in maths and code-generation tasks. It natively supports function calls and JSON output, making it easy to work with through APIs.
One of the key features that stands out is its native fluency and cultural awareness in French, Spanish, German, and Italian, giving it an edge in European market use cases.
Mistral offers a model self-hosting option for firms with strict data privacy requirements.