Mistral AI announces Large 2

Mistral AI released a fresh new flagship model on Wednesday July 24. Large 2, which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning.

Mistral Large 2 has been released just one day after Meta dropped its latest and greatest open source model, Llama 3.1 405b. Mistral says Large 2 raises the bar for performance and cost for open source models, backing up the statement with a handful of benchmarks.

Large 2 appears to outpace Llama 3.1 405B on code generation and math performance, and does so with under a third of the parameters: 123 billion, to be precise.

In a press release, Mistral said that one of its key focus areas during training was to minimize the model’s hallucination issues. The company said Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, acknowledging when it does not know something instead of making something up that seems plausible.

It’s fundamental to note that Mistral’s models are not open source in the traditional sense – any commercial application of the model needs a paid license.

Something missing from Mistral Large 2, and was also absent from Meta’s Llama 3.1 release yesterday, are multimodal capabilities. OpenAI and Google seems far ahead of the competition with regard to multimodal AI systems, capable of processing image and text simultaneously, a feature some startups are increasingly looking to build with.

In their announcement Mistral AI showed that Mistral Large 2 vastly outperforms the previous Mistral Large and performs on par with leading models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 405B on coding and reasoning tasks.

You can use Mistral Large 2 today via Mistral AI's la Plateforme under the name mistral-large-2407, and test it. It is available under the version 24.07 (a YY.MM versioning system that we are applying to all our models), and the API name mistral-large-2407. Weights for the instruct model are available and are also hosted on HuggingFace.