The new LLM is free, open source, and holds up well against more established competitors.

Image created with Mistral AI

Mistral AI has unveiled its latest technological marvel: Mistral 7B. The new open-source Large Language Model (LLM) aims to offer a blend of power and accessibility, and provide a credible alternative to more established players like OpenAI ChatGPT, Claude AI, and Google Bard.

Paris-based Mistral claims its model is incredibly powerful and better than the competition. While evaluating such claims is a relative exercise in weighing pros and cons, my testing found a lot to brag about.

Starting with the alluring Bitcoin theme, the latest version of Mistral, called Mistral 7B, scored 8.5/10 on a GPT-4 test of generating a paragraph that begins with the phrase “Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.” The Parisian prodigy held its own against its predecessors, beating out LlaMA-2 7B (which scored 8/10) and Stability AI’s Stable Beluga 2 (which scored 7/10).

Mistral's text generation. Source: Hugging Face Decryption

What makes Mistral unique is its emphasis on openness and adaptability.

“We are releasing Mistral 7B under the Apache 2.0 license, making it available for unrestricted use,” the company said. “Using an open model is the best way for vendors and users to build sustainable businesses around AI solutions.”

This approach democratizes AI and ensures transparency, allowing developers to inspect, tweak, and improve existing code bases, accelerating innovation.

Mistral also provides users with greater privacy because it can be run on a local computer and does not require access to the internet or a specific cloud service.

The company says its mission is focused on developing open-weight models that are “on par with proprietary solutions.” Unconstrained by fixed business models, Mistral AI can benefit a wide range of areas, including R&D, customer service, and marketing.

There’s clearly more to Paris than the Louvre or Notre Dame: The City of Lights is also fostering a strong AI scene.

You can download Mistral 7b directly to your computer, or use cloud streaming on Hugging Face. #Mistral  #AI