Arthur Mensch, former DeepMind researcher and CEO of Mistral AI, will take to the Exchange Stage at
Money20/20 Europe in June to discuss the French company’s recent €490 million ($533 million) in funding, as well as the release of their two open models - Mistral 7B and Mistral 8x7B
- and their multi-year partnership with Microsoft to offer Mistral Large via Azure. Here’s an overview of Mistral AI ahead of the event.
Is Mistral AI free?
Mistral AI shot to fame in 2023 when the French AI company raised €105 million ($114 million) just a few weeks after its launch, when it did not have products or revenues, as reported by
Le Monde. The company then received a new €385 million ($419 million) round of financing as well as a €2 billion valuation, putting Mistral AI on track to become a unicorn just months after launch.
At the time, Mensch said that they were “pursuing a clear trajectory: To create a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible and decentralized approach to technology.” Since then, Mistral
AI has dominated headlines and has captured attention due to its numerous partnerships, and products, notably for free usage.
What Mistral AI models are available?
Mistral AI, co-founded by Mensch and former Meta employees Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, has released several AI models for both commercial and open models. The latter are available free of charge with fully permissible licenses, include the Mistral
7B transformer model, its smaller original model fluent in English with an 8K content window, and its most capable open model, Mixtral 8x7B with a 32K context window fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, code, according to the website.
In terms of commercial models, Mistral Small, Mistral Embed, and Mistral Large, serve different purposes, varying in costs, and workload capabilities. Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, is also offered for free in beta, and it can use Mistral Large, Mistral Small,
or Mistral Next, a prototype model, which users can toggle between.
Is Mistral AI better than ChatGPT?
Mistral AI's open models can be accessed through the website; however, as these are more for use by developers and to be integrated into an organisation’s own AI applications, they may be difficult to use for the everyday person. Le Chat, however, operates
much like ChatGPT and simpler to use.
One standout feature of Mistral AI’s Le Chat and Mistral Large is that the services are available in different languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, making it more accessible to the wider public. ChatGPT is only available in
English, and therefore, there are limitations around who can access these models to leverage them.