Mistral, a French AI startup, has announced the release of its first generative AI models designed to run on edge devices such as laptops and phones. The new family of models, dubbed ‘Les Ministraux,’ can be used or tuned for various applications, from basic text generation to working in conjunction with more capable models to complete tasks.
Les Ministraux: A New Family of Generative AI Models
Mistral has developed two Les Ministraux models: Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. Both models have a context window of 128,000 tokens, which means they can ingest roughly the length of a 50-page book.
According to Mistral’s blog post, the company’s most innovative customers and partners have increasingly been asking for local, privacy-first inference for critical applications such as on-device translation, internet-less smart assistants, local analytics, and autonomous robotics. Les Ministraux were built to provide a compute-efficient and low-latency solution for these scenarios.
Ministral 8B: Available for Research Purposes
Ministral 8B is available for download as of today, albeit strictly for research purposes. Mistral requires developers and companies interested in Ministral 8B or Ministral 3B self-deployment setups to contact the company for a commercial license.
Using Les Ministraux through Cloud Platforms
Alternatively, developers can use Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B through Mistral’s cloud platform, La Platforme, and other clouds with which the startup has partnered in the coming weeks. Ministral 8B costs 10 cents per million output/input tokens (~750,000 words), while Ministral 3B costs 4 cents per million output/input tokens.
Trend towards Small Models
There’s been a trend towards small models lately, which are cheaper and quicker to train, fine-tune, and run than their larger counterparts. Google continues to add models to its Gemma small model family, while Microsoft offers its Phi collection of models. In the most recent refresh of its Llama suite, Meta introduced several small models optimized for edge hardware.
Les Ministraux Outperform Comparable Models
Mistral claims that Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B outperform comparable Llama and Gemma models — as well as its own Mistral 7B — on several AI benchmarks designed to evaluate instruction-following and problem-solving capabilities.
Mistral’s Growing Product Portfolio
Paris-based Mistral, which recently raised $640 million in venture capital, continues to gradually expand its AI product portfolio. Over the past few months, the company has launched a free service for developers to test its models, an SDK to let customers fine-tune those models, and new models, including a generative model for code called Codestral.
Mistral’s Mission
Co-founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind, Mistral’s stated mission is to create flagship models that rival the best-performing models today, like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude — and ideally make money in the process. While the ‘making money’ bit is proving to be challenging (as it is for most generative AI startups), Mistral reportedly began to generate revenue this summer.
Conclusion
Mistral’s release of Les Ministraux marks a significant step towards making generative AI more accessible and efficient for edge devices. With its growing product portfolio and commitment to creating flagship models, Mistral is positioning itself as a key player in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI technology.
