Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and anthropic as its latest advertisement shows. The company is launching a new flagship large language model called the Mistral Large. It is designed to rival other top-tier models in reasoning capabilities, such as GPT-4 and Claude 2.
In addition to Mistral Large, the startup is also launching its own alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called The chat. This chat assistant is currently available in beta.
If you're not familiar with Mistral AI, the company is best known for its cap table, having raised an obscene amount of money in a very short time to develop fundamental AI models. The company was officially incorporated in May 2023. Just a few weeks later, Mistral AI raised a $112 million seed round. In December, the company closed a financing round of 415 million dollars with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the round.
Founded by alumni of Google's DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI was originally positioned as an artificial intelligence company with an open source approach. Although the first Mistral AI model was released under an open source license with access to model weights, that is not the case for their larger models.
Mistral AI's business model is increasingly similar to OpenAI's business model, as the company offers Mistral Large through a paid API with usage-based pricing. It currently costs $8 per million tokens in and $24 per million tokens out to check out Mistral Large. In artificial language jargon, tokens represent small fragments of words; For example, the word “TechCrunch” will be split into two tokens, “Tech” and “Crunch,” when processed by an AI model.
By default, Mistral AI supports 32k token contextual windows. Supports English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
For comparison, GPT-4 with a 32k token context window currently costs $60 per million input tokens and $120 per million output tokens. Therefore, Mistral Large is currently 5 to 7.5 times cheaper than GPT-4-32k. Things are changing at a rapid pace and AI companies update their prices regularly.
Image credits: Mistral AI
But how does Mistral Large compare to GPT-4 and Claude 2? As always, it is very difficult to know. Mistral AI claims to be second only to GPT-4 based on various benchmarks. But there could be some benchmark selections and disparities in real-life usage. We'll have to do more research to see how it performs in our tests.
An alternative to ChatGPT
Mistral AI is also launching a chat assistant today called Le Chat. Anyone can sign up and try it chat.mistral.ai. The company says that for now it is a beta version and that there could be “quirks.”
While access to the service is free (for now), users can choose from three different models: Mistral Small, Mistral Large, and a prototype model designed to be short and concise called Mistral Next.
The company also plans to launch a paid version of Le Chat for enterprise customers. In addition to central billing, enterprise customers will be able to define moderation mechanisms.
A partnership with Microsoft
Finally, Mistral AI is also taking advantage of today's news to announce a partnership with Microsoft. In addition to Mistral's own API platform, Microsoft is going to provide Mistral models to your Azure customers.
It's just another model from the Azure catalog, which doesn't seem like a big deal. And yet, it also means that Mistral AI and Microsoft are now having conversations about collaboration opportunities and potentially more. The first benefit of that partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
As for Microsoft, the company is the main investor in OpenAI's limited profit subsidiary. But it has also welcomed other AI models on its cloud computing platform. For example, Microsoft and Meta couple to deliver large Llama language models in Azure.
This open partnership strategy is a good way to keep your Azure customers in your product ecosystem. It could also help when it comes to anti-competitive scrutiny.