Mistral AI releases Codestral, its first generative AI model for coding.

Riding the AI ​​wave in the developer world, French startup Mistral AI has released its first generative AI model for coding: Codestral. This model helps developers write and communicate with code and supports more than 80 programming languages. Mistral has launched a hosted version of Codestral on its Le Chat AI platform and its paid API.

Coding with Codestral

Codestral, Mistral AI’s new coding model, is trained on more than 80 programming languages, including Python, Java, C++, and JavaScript. The model can execute coding functions, write tests and complete partial code, and answer codebase questions in English.

Mistral describes its model as “open,” although that doesn’t seem to be entirely the case. The license prohibits the use of Codestral and its output for commercial purposes. The company describes an “exceptional situation” for development, but also prohibits “any internal use by employees in the course of the company’s business.” One possible explanation for this could be that Mistral AI uses copyrighted content.

Performance

Mistral AI pits its 22B model against other models to compare performance and latency space for code generation. It’s important to note that the 22 billion parameter model requires a robust PC to run. While it beats the competition in the benchmarks below, it’s up to you to try the service and confirm this claim.

Other models like ChatGPT can also help developers with coding questions, although a recent study found that ChatGPT gets one in two programming questions wrong. OpenAI recently signed a licensing agreement with coding forum Stack Overflow, giving the company access to messages from Stack Overflow to answer coding questions even more accurately.

Work

Those who want to try out Codestral will need to license it under the new Mistral AI Non-Production License, which means you can use it for research and testing purposes. Codestral can be downloaded via HuggingFace. In addition, you can also communicate with Codestral via Le Chat, Mistral’s AI chatbot, and this is also available directly on the usual API endpoint.