one year on
Mistral launches GPT-4-class flagship model and Le Chat assistant, inks Microsoft partnership
The French AI startup known for open-source releases pivots toward a closed, API-first business model with a new top-tier model and a chat interface, and a Microsoft investment.
Paris-based Mistral AI this morning unveiled Mistral Large, a closed-source flagship model it claims is the second-best generally available via API, trailing only GPT-4. The company also launched Le Chat, a free beta chat assistant that lets users sample Mistral Large alongside a smaller, latency-optimized model called Mistral Small and a prototype dubbed Mistral Next. Le Chat does not yet support web search.
Mistral Large supports English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and offers a 32K-token context window. It costs $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens — roughly 20% cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo. The model includes native function calling and JSON mode, which Mistral said it used to build Le Chat’s moderation layer.
The bigger news may be the partnership with Microsoft: Mistral Large is available today on Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning, making Microsoft the startup’s first distribution partner. TechCrunch reported that Microsoft made a $16 million investment in Mistral AI. TechCrunch said the deal could also help when it comes to anticompetitive scrutiny.
Mistral, which raised over $500 million last year with an open-source pitch, is now increasingly resembling the closed-model incumbents it once positioned itself against. The company still offers open-weight models like Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, but its commercial future clearly lies behind an API.
The record
Reported that Mistral Large ranks second after GPT-4 on certain benchmarks, but cautioned about possible cherry-picking and real-world variance.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Mistral Large never displaced GPT-4 in popularity, but the Microsoft partnership helped Mistral gain enterprise traction in Europe. The EU’s preliminary review of the investment closed without formal action, though the deal fueled ongoing debate about how to police Big Tech’s influence over foundation-model startups.