Mistral Unveils Pixtral Large and Enhances Le Chat: A New Era in Multimodal AI

Mistral, the French startup that grabbed attention with its record-setting seed funding in Europe, has just announced major updates. They’ve introduced Pixtral Large, a new foundational model, and upgraded their free web-based chatbot, Le Chat. These advancements aim to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and make it more accessible to users worldwide.

Pixtral Large — Mistral’s New Multimodal AI Model

Mistral has launched Pixtral Large, a 124-billion-parameter model that builds upon its predecessors, Mistral Large 2 and Pixtral 12-B. This powerful model combines a 123-billion-parameter text decoder with a 1-billion-parameter vision encoder. What does this mean? It excels in processing both text and visual data.

According to Sophia Yang, Mistral’s Head of Developer Relations, Pixtral Large shines in “multilingual OCR [optical character recognition], reasoning, chart understanding, and more.” With a context window of 128,000 tokens, it can handle up to 30 high-resolution images per input or process around a 300-page book. This makes it comparable to leading models like OpenAI’s GPT series.

Pixtral Large demonstrates top-notch performance across various benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2. It’s ideal for tasks like interpreting charts, analyzing documents, and understanding images.

While the model and its weights are available for free download on Hugging Face, they come under the Mistral AI Research License. This license specifies that the model is intended for non-commercial, research-focused applications. For commercial use, you have two options. Access it through Mistral’s API on their managed web service, Le Platforme. Alternatively, obtain a separate license directly from the company.

Le Chat — Mistral’s Enhanced Free Web-Based Chatbot

At the heart of Mistral’s AI tools is Le Chat, a free platform now boosted with new features powered by Pixtral Large. Le Chat is designed for various uses like research, brainstorming, and automation. It blends text, vision, and interactive functions into a smooth productivity experience.

New Features of Le Chat:

Web Search with Citations: Now, you can supplement the AI’s knowledge with real-time web searches, complete with source citations for transparency. This feature ensures you get up-to-date information while knowing exactly where it comes from.
Canvas for Ideation: This innovative interface lets you create, modify, and collaborate on documents, presentations, and designs in an interactive space next to the chatbot. As Sophia Yang noted, Le Chat Canvas is “great for creative ideation. You can use Canvas to create documents, presentations, code, mockups… the list goes on.”
Advanced Document and Image Analysis: With Pixtral Large, Le Chat can process and summarize complex PDFs. It can extract insights from graphs, tables, equations, and more. This makes it a powerful tool for analyzing detailed documents and images.
Image Generation: Through a partnership with Black Forest Labs, Le Chat now includes image generation capabilities powered by the Flux Pro model. This allows you to produce high-quality visuals directly in the chat interface.
Task Agents for Automation: Customizable agents can automate repetitive tasks like summarizing meeting minutes, processing invoices, or scanning receipts. This saves you time and effort, allowing you to focus on more important tasks.

These features position Le Chat as a versatile AI assistant capable of handling tasks that usually require multiple tools. While competitors might require premium subscriptions for similar functionalities, Le Chat offers an integrated, multimodal experience entirely for free during its beta phase.

Mistral’s Position in the AI Landscape

With Pixtral Large and the enhanced Le Chat, Mistral is showing its strength in research and development. They’re advancing their offerings to compete with industry leaders, and they’re doing so with fewer parameters—124 billion compared to, say, Meta’s latest models.

Mistral is focused on making advanced AI accessible. By offering powerful models and tools for free or under accessible licenses, they’re empowering researchers, developers, and businesses alike.

In a world where AI is becoming increasingly important, Mistral stands out as a strong European player. They offer alternatives to AI solutions from U.S.-based companies, providing diversity in the global AI ecosystem.

Conclusion

Mistral’s launch of Pixtral Large and the upgraded features in Le Chat mark significant milestones in the AI industry. By combining advanced capabilities with user-friendly interfaces, they’re making powerful AI tools available to a broader audience.

Whether you’re a researcher, developer, or business professional, Mistral’s latest offerings provide valuable resources to enhance your work. With their commitment to innovation and accessibility, Mistral is set to make a lasting impact on the AI landscape.