French AI startup Mistral made an exciting announcement on Monday, unveiling several new features for its free generative AI assistant, known as le Chat. This update is designed to enhance the chatbot’s capabilities, bringing it in line with leading models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
One of the key improvements is le Chat’s new ability to search the web and provide citations, similar to the functions offered by platforms like Perplexity and SearchGPT. Additionally, the chatbot has introduced a Canvas feature that allows users to edit and modify content and code, reminiscent of Claude’s Artifacts. Le Chat can now also create images, thanks to its partnership with Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro, which is the same technology that enables Grok-2’s image generation.
Furthermore, le Chat has gained the capability to analyze and summarize large PDF documents, including graphs and equations. Mistral is also launching AI “agents” that can streamline repetitive workflows, which employees within a company can share, marking a significant step in automation.
Many of these advancements are powered by Mistral’s latest model, the Pixtral Large, which boasts 128 billion parameters. Built on the foundation of Mistral Large 2, this frontier model supports a remarkable 128k prompt window and demonstrates outstanding performance across various industry benchmarks, such as MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2.
In its announcement, Mistral highlighted that “Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images.” Additionally, the company is rolling out an updated version of its flagship Mistral Large model, known as Version 24.11, which reportedly shows enhanced performance for tasks necessitating extensive context, such as document analysis.
Mistral emphasizes its unique approach to artificial intelligence, stating, “We’re not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities.” This strategy has allowed Mistral to manage its resources effectively while consistently providing cutting-edge capabilities at accessible price points. Consequently, all newly introduced features are currently available for free to all users of le Chat.
Founded in April 2023 by ex-employees from Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind, Mistral is currently valued at $2 billion and offers nearly a dozen different AI models for both commercial and research use. Among these models, Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B are open-source and accessible to the public via Hugging Face, while Mistral’s Small, Medium, and Large models remain closed-source and require the Mistral API for access. Users can access both Large 24.11 and Pixtral Large either through a commercial use license or a more restrictive research license.
