French AI startup Mistral overhauls its chat service
Mistral AI significantly expands its offering. In addition to free services and price reductions, the startup presents an improved language model and introduces image processing functions.
French AI startup Mistral AI has announced major updates to its services. The changes include a new free tier, lower prices, an improved language model, and image processing capabilities.
Mistral is introducing a free level for its "la Plateforme" service. This allows developers to test and prototype AI models at no cost, with the option to easily upgrade to paid plans later.
New model and image processing
The company is also reducing prices across its entire model lineup. Mistral claims its Large 2 model is now the most cost-effective high-end option available. The new pricing will be reflected in offerings from cloud partners like Azure AI Studio, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI.
Mistral has upgraded its smaller language model as well. The new Mistral Small v24.09 has 22 billion parameters and offers significant improvements in language understanding, reasoning, and code generation.
The company is also adding image processing to its free "le Chat" chatbot. This feature uses the recently released Pixtral 12B model, which can handle images of any size without impacting text performance.
Mistral has strong competition
Founded in 2023, Mistral AI has quickly become one of Europe's most promising AI companies. With just 60 employees, the startup aims to compete against giants like OpenAI and Google by offering lower costs and open-source models. However, Mistral faces stiff competition, particularly from Meta's Llama 3 in the open-source space.
Despite these challenges, Mistral recently secured about $600 million in funding. This investment values the startup at nearly 6 billion euros, triple its valuation from December.
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