French AI startup Mistral has unveiled Pixtral Large, a new 124-billion-parameter language model, alongside major updates to its Le Chat platform, reports Carl Franzen. The new model features advanced multimodal capabilities, including image processing and optical character recognition, while maintaining a significant context window of 128,000 tokens. The model is available for research purposes through Hugging Face, though commercial use requires licensing through Mistral’s API.
Le Chat, Mistral’s free web-based chatbot, now includes web search with citations, an interactive canvas for document creation, image generation through Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro model, and advanced document analysis capabilities. These updates position Le Chat as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though Mistral’s platform currently lacks some advanced audio features found in rival products.