French AI startup Mistral has released its first multimodal model, Pixtral 12B. In other words, it has 12 billion parameters and can process both images and text. It is based on Mistral’s existing text model Nemo 12B and is said to be able to answer questions about any number of images of any size.
Pixtral 12B is currently freely available via GitHub and the Hugging Face AI development platform under an Apache 2.0 license. According to Mistral, the model can be downloaded, customized, and used without restrictions. A public demo version is not yet available, but will soon be accessible via Mistral’s chatbot and API platforms.
With this new model, Mistral is expanding its portfolio of AI models and competing directly with established providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The one-year-old startup, in which Microsoft holds a minority stake, is seen as the European answer to OpenAI and recently raised $645 million in a funding round. The company’s strategy so far includes releasing free open models, paid versions, and consulting services for enterprise customers.
Sources: TechCrunch, VentureBeat