Mistral—a French startup—recently launched their flagship language model named Mistral 7b. The LLM with over seven billion parameters has since made a considerable reputation for itself in the tech community, with numerous developers touting it to be a potent open-source alternative to larger chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard. The Paris-based firm raised a considerable amount of money in its seed-funding stages and gained prominence because of its team, which is composed of seasoned AI developers from Meta, Google DeepMind, and Hugging Face. Among the investors is also Eric Schmidt—former Google CEO—providing the firm with stellar credentials when it comes to the AI niche. Despite being a small LLM, Mistral 7b packs a lot of power and is known for its seamless capabilities that make it easy to audit and track errors.
Given that AI’s pitfalls are of major concern, Mistral AI wants to ensure that all instances of bias or incorrect information are promptly recorded. Being an open-source LLM, Mistral 7b is available on numerous platforms including GitHub and Hugging Face, allowing global developers to access the framework. Mistral has adopted a unique approach to making the language model business-friendly as well as low-cost, as the firm believes that LLMs will be instrumental in shaping future digital technologies. Moreover, tracking performance and carrying out ethical studies on these tools is equally important as AI has the potential to impact society and prevalent opinions. The LLM today is available for download as well and has garnered significant traction. Upcoming sections explore more of Mistral 7b and its interesting features.
Mistral AI’s Key Features: A Rising Open Source LLM
Mistral is a firm with seasoned developers from major tech firms.
Mistral 7b has been developed by a team of AI researchers and developers who are endowed with a wide range of experience. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Mistral AI can be used by just about anyone, regardless of whether they’re an enterprise or an individual developer. No restrictions on use or reproduction exist save for attribution, making it a great open-source alternative to ChatGPT and other major chatbots. Mistral 7b is said to be a highly specialized LLM despite its small size and has beaten other major open-source competitors like LlaMa 2 on benchmark tests. While larger language models like GPT-4 or Claude 2 can perform more complex tasks and achieve pinpoint results, they’re also very expensive to run. On the other hand, Mistral 7b is not as demanding and can be operated without the need for extensive hardware requirements. Regardless of its small size, Mistral 7b deploys sliding window attention, which uses stacked layers of the large language model to address longer-length sequences with ease. The same technology also allows it to optimize power and prevents the model from spending too much time on any given sequence, making it efficient.
Mistral AI is also highly customizable and can be deployed easily across the board, enabling simple adoption by a wide range of customers. It comprises around 7.3 billion parameters and offers a highly malleable LLM for enthusiasts to work with. Apart from Hugging Face and GitHub, enthusiasts can also access the instruct model from the AI firm Perplexity’s experimental AI hosting platform called Perplexity Labs. Besides AI writing and efficient summarization, Mistral 7b is also highly efficient at coding and can help developers rectify their work. It is also intuitive enough to classify text, making it a potent tool for sentiment analysis, and can be used for spam detection tools and software. Its text capabilities make it a capable underlying LLM for chatbots, especially in business settings and customer service use cases.
Open Source AI and the Potential for Mistral 7b
Mistral 7b is the first among Mistral’s launches, with more to come in the months to follow.
While Mistral 7b is an open-source model, the firm has sights on larger markets and also intends on releasing a commercial model shortly. The paid variant of the generative AI solution will offer users the opportunity to access model weights and training data. The open source offering essentially competes with other counterparts such as Hugging Chat, LlaMa 2, and StableLM. The current 7b model is only the first among Mistral’s upcoming releases, and the firm is actively working on launching a larger 13-billion-parameter-long alternative, which might witness a launch in early 2024. The seamless summarization feature can make it especially popular among users looking to produce a steady stream of AI-generated content, whether as chatbots or as AI writing tools.
Much like their larger counterparts, the larger models of Mistral AI might also host API access, essentially making the language model more available to customers across different platforms and on their customized architectures. Mistral’s launch comes at a time when global rivalries in the AI market have been steadily heating up. AI has been a key area of focus for the current French dispensation, and the success of Mistral 7b puts France on the AI map as a capable producer of large language models. Similar launches from Alibaba in China and a steady stream of AIs coming out of the United States have resulted in a muted yet palpable competition between various nations across the world in creating capable AI technologies to cater to both domestic and international markets.
Why Open Source ChatGPT Alternatives Like Mistral Are Important
Open-source AI models will soon be at the forefront of innovation in AI.
While the AI industry has been witnessing exponential growth, there have also been concerns about censorship and restrictive practices that prevent open access and fair usage of AI tools. In such an environment, open-source AI tools and alternatives become important components to bring in balance. Moreover, highly efficient open-source LLMs like Mistral 7b elicit the potential of these technologies in an unrestricted framework where multiple contributors can access and also add to existing capabilities. As the precepts of responsible AI are adhered to more stringently, open-source AIs also become important from the perspective of AI safety. Firms like Mistral signal a new beginning in the AI industry where open-source LLMs despite their limited size are just as, if not more, capable than larger models.
FAQs
1. Is Mistral 7b free?
Yes, Mistral 7b is a completely free, open source LLM that is available for users to either download or deploy using platforms like GitHub, HuggingFace, and Perplexity Labs.
2. Where is Mistral based?
Mistral is a French tech startup composed of AI researchers and developers. A good portion of the team comes from major tech companies such as Meta, Google, and Hugging Face.
3. How many parameters does Mistral 7b have?
Mistral 7b has about 7.3 billion parameters. Despite its small size, the language model is highly precise and efficient in its operations.