Mistal announces its largest LLM to date. Mistral Large 2 has refined its programming skills and is proficient in up to 80 programming languages.

The competition between AI models is heating up again. After Meta yesterday, today it is Mistral’s turn to present its latest showpiece. With 123 billion parameters, Mistral Large 2 is the largest LLM the French company has produced to date.

The number of parameters is still considerably lower than other well-known LLMs. For example, LLama 3.1, proposed yesterday by Meta, has a version with 405 billion parameters. Mistral Large 2 fits perfectly on an Nvidia H100, we learn from a post on X.

Big, but not the biggest

The number of parameters of a model says a lot, but not everything, about the model’s capabilities. Mistral plans to demonstrate this with benchmarks comparing the model to Llama 3.1, GPT-4o, and Claude Sonnet 3.5 (Google Gemini is not allowed to participate). Mistral Large 2 can process up to as many tokens as Meta’s model, up to 128,000 in a single prompt.

Mistral Large 2 has made great strides in coding, the company describes in a blog. The first Mistral Large model did not prove to be particularly good, but the second version can speak up to eighty languages, although it naturally masters some programming languages ​​better than others. Mistral claims its model is the expert in Java.

Mistral also emphasizes Large 2’s linguistic talent. The model speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic and Korean. Dutch is not mentioned. What Mistral Large 2 does not offer are multimodal capabilities that allow it to process images and text simultaneously. This seems to be OpenAI’s specialization.

Open for research

Like Llama 3.1, Mistral Large 2 is essentially open source, but is not available to everyone for free download. Researchers can apply for a free license from the company, but anyone who wants to use the model commercially must pay a fee. The model is available through Google Vertex, AWS BedRock, Azure AI Studio, IBM watson.x, and to the general public through the chat application Le Chat.

Mistral is an outsider in the AI ​​world. The company was born and raised in Europe and likes to emphasize that European character to stand out in a sector dominated by American superpowers. They are all after Mistral. Microsoft seemed to be luring Mistral, but the European Commission doesn’t like that.