Mistral 7B, the 1st generative AI model of Mistral AI, the ”huge bet” French

Can Mistral AI be Europe’s answer to the dominance of American companies over generative artificial intelligence models? Founded only at the beginning of 2023, the startup of three AI researchers has already raised 105 million euros in seed funding.

To make its promises a reality, Mistral AI must however deliver solutions, and quickly. The young startup responds by announcing the availability to developers of its first open source model.

An Apache 2 licensed model with 7 billion parameters

“This first availability comes a little more than four months after the creation of the company, in accordance with its strategic roadmap,” Mistral AI would like to emphasize in a press release.

Called Mistral 7B, the LLM model is presented as “small in size”. The startup’s ambition is indeed to design highly specialized solutions that can be deployed on corporate infrastructures and are less expensive to operate.

Mistral 7B is qualified as small because it has 7 billion parameters, far from the hundreds of billions of generalist LLMs proposed by Open AI.  However, its designers assure that it “far surpasses the performance of the best model of 13 billion parameters available to date””

At the same time, the new model makes it possible to halve the computing power necessary for its use (-46%). During an interview conducted before the announcement of Mistral AI, on September 19, Hanan Ouazan, Partner & Generative AI Lead for Artefact, confirmed the finalization of this first model.

Mistral AI in PoC in France

The expert of the firm specialized in AI highlighted the speed of execution of the startup’s researchers and the relevance of their choices. Artefact collaborates with Mistral AI on a PoC for a client whose identity is not specified at this stage.

The differentiator of the French startup is to bet on specialized and open source models. Offered under the Apache 2.0 license, the Mistral 7B code and its parameters can be updated and modified for commercial uses.

The LLM is “the first variation of a series of models that will be gradually distributed over the coming months. It already allows its users to solve a large number of text processing or generation tasks.”

The model is accompanied by a deployment solution on existing cloud environments, says Mistral again. Finally, it should be noted that his teams are now working on “training significantly larger and more efficient models.”

A huge bet for France Digitale

To generate revenue, the company announces the rapid availability of “commercial hosting and template specialization solutions for professional use cases.”The results of the European startup are being followed very closely by decision-makers, politicians and investors in particular.

On the occasion of the Big Data & AI Paris 2023 fair, the CEO of France Digitale, Maya Noël regretted the absence of a European champion of generative AI. “We need a much more mature tech ecosystem”” she reacted.

The investment of 105 million euros in Mistral AI aims to support this development. “It’s a huge gamble. Did we get it in time? We hope so. We must try not to lag behind”” commented the CEO of France Digitale.

If not? “If we are unable to develop our own LLM model, we must be very fast and reactive in our uses.”She regrets in this respect the European will to want to regulate, from now on, AI Gen through a framework “very very restrictive.”

This opinion is shared by several members of the new Generative AI committee set up by the French government to make proposals and adapt its national strategy on artificial intelligence.