Exploring Mistral AI: French Startup Revolutionizing Generative Models
The US companies consistently hold the lead among AI product developers. The key ones among them are OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Anthropic. But a French startup, Mistral AI, is confidently trying to establish itself as a key player in the AI industry. We dedicated this article to it. You will learn what Mistral AI is, what technologies it represents on the market, how and where they are used, and what its main differences from competitors are.
What Is Mistral AI and Why It Matters
Mistral AI is a French startup that produces large language models (LLM). Although it holds a relatively small share of the global AI systems market, its impressive capitalization (over $6 billion) and a significant amount of investment (over $1 billion) have made it the most valuable AI startup in Europe.
The company was founded in April 2023 by three former Google DeepMind and Meta employees: Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix. At the time of writing, the first of them is Mistral AI CEO, the second is CSO, and the third is CTO.
The startup received its first funding in June 2023. Its volume amounted to €113 million. The investment round included Lightspeed Venture Partners, JCDecaux, and businessmen Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel.
In December 2023, the startup managed to raise another €385 million in its second investment round. The top participants included the Andreessen Horowitz fund, the financial group BNP Paribas, and Salesforce. After that, its estimated value reached $2 billion.
In June 2024, the startup raised a record tranche of €600 million. At that time, the total volume of Mistral AI funding exceeded €1 billion.
Mistral AI's debut product was the open-source Mistral 7B language model, which was released in September 2023. The company then released a more powerful version, LLM Mixtral 8x7B, which outperformed Meta's Llama 2 70B in a number of ways.
In February 2024, Mistral AI entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft. In addition to an investment of €15 million, their collaboration involves the launch of the French startup's AI products on the Microsoft Azure platform.
In January 2025, Mistral AI announced a partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP). It also collaborates with IBM, Orange, and Stellantis, as well as the French Ministry of Defense.
Core Technologies Behind Mistral AI
Mistral AI has a broad product line. It includes publicly available open-source LLMs (distributed under the free Apache 2.0 license), general-purpose commercial and specialized language models, and the Le Chat chatbot.
Open-source LLMs:
- Mistral Small 3. A general-purpose open-source LLM that performs AI-specific tasks with high accuracy (over 81% on MMLU) and low latency (150 tokens/sec). It competes well with larger models (Llama 3.3 70B or Qwen 32B) and could be a good alternative to proprietary LLMs (GPT-4o mini). The latest version of Mistral Small 3 was released in January 2025.
- Pixtral 12B. Mistral's first multimodal model was released in September 2024. It recognizes text and images with 52.5% accuracy on MMMU. This LLM is good at interpreting graphs and charts, answering questions about document content, following instructions, and performing multimodal reasoning. It also supports processing images of any size and quantity using URLs or base64 encoding.
Premium LLMs:
- Mistral Large 2. The startup’s flagship model was released in July 2024. It has a context window of 128,000 tokens and can understand queries in 12 natural languages and over 80 programming languages. This LLM efficiently solves complex problems, generating accurate and concise answers. In the field of code generation and mathematical calculations, it outperforms Llama 3.1 405B. In November 2024, its new version, Mistral Large 24.11, was released. They are available through Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, IBM watsonx.ai, and Mistral AI API.
- Pixtral Large. The largest and most powerful multimodal model was released in November 2024. Its context window has 128,000 tokens, allowing it to process at least 30 high-quality images at a time. It interprets images, diagrams, and text documents with high accuracy. It is available under the Mistral Research License (MRL) for educational and scientific purposes, and under the Mistral Commercial License for commercial purposes.
Specialized LLMs:
- Codestral. This LLM understands over 80 programming languages and specializes in high-frequency, low-latency tasks: fill-in-the-middle (FIM), code fixing, and test development. The latest version of Codestral at the time of writing was released in January 2025. Its context window is 256,000 tokens.
- Mistral Embed. A semantic language model designed to extract representations of text fragments.
- Mistral Moderation. This LLM is trained to recognize dangerous and malicious text content.
- Mathstral. An open-source model for solving complex mathematical problems that require multistep logical reasoning. Released July 2024.
Le Chat
Mistral AI's chat called Le Chat is one of the most well-known products of the French startup. In its functionality, it is similar to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The chatbot responds to user requests, writes and edits text, generates and processes images, creates and analyzes program code. The AI assistant supports collaboration in a visual workspace and develops custom automation workflows. There is an option to select LLM when launching the bot. In addition, Le Chat searches for information on the Internet in real time, supports data connectors, and API integration with external systems. It can be used through a web interface and a mobile application (iOS, Android).
Practical Use Cases of Mistral AI
Access to open and proprietary LLMs is available on the company's official website. The functionality for running models, as well as developing and deploying AI applications based on them, is hosted on the La Plateforme resource. The platform allows developers to train and configure custom LLMs, adapting them to the required specifications, and then deploy them based on third-party software.
There are several more ways how to use Mistral AI:
- Download the product to your computer and run it locally.
- Integrate models with external systems via API.
- Deploy LLM on cloud services (Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Studio, IBM watsonx.ai, Snowflake, NVIDIA, and others).
What is Mistral AI used for? Firstly, for automation of tasks and processes. We offer you a selection of real cases of LLM Mistral applications by well-known companies and organizations from different industries.
Finance and insurance
Enterprise-level AI solutions are actively used by leading European banks and insurance companies. In particular, the French bank BNP Paribas uses Mistral models to optimize processes in sales, customer service, and analysis of global markets. More than 140,000 employees of the transnational insurance company AXA use LLM for text generation and processing.
E-commerce
Mistral AI helps e-commerce companies optimize and scale their digital operations with agility. Its models power the automated catalog management system of the French online marketplace Mirakl, which processes more than 10 million products monthly. They also provide a personalized shopping experience for customers of the German online retailer Zalando.
Production and logistics
Mistral's AI-based solutions demonstrate high efficiency in supply chain management, including on a global scale. By implementing the personal AI assistant MAIA, the French transport company CMA CGM managed to increase the productivity of more than 155,000 employees in 160 countries.
Healthcare
Mistral AI use cases are presented in the healthcare industry. Its language models are used in Synapse Medicine, a virtual assistant designed to analyze patient data and make medical recommendations. They are also used by the large pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre. LLMs help to improve operational efficiency.
Government agencies
Mistral’s AI products bring tangible benefits to government agencies, allowing them to improve the quality of their services. One of the most striking examples of such integration is the French state unemployment agency France Travail. Thanks to LLM, it was able to automate the processes of data analysis and user service.
How Mistral AI Stands Out Among Competitors
Competition among AI solutions is growing rapidly, and users are increasingly faced with a choice between products from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Mistral AI. We invite you to take a closer look at the key features and advantages of Mistral AI, comparing them with competitors' offerings. This will help you understand what features make the French startup unique and what you should pay attention to when choosing an AI tool.
Mistral AI vs. OpenAI
Both companies offer a wide range of AI products. We will compare the most popular of them — the Le Chat chatbot with the Mistral Large 2 model and the ChatGPT chatbot with the GPT-4o mini model.
The French startup calls its product the fastest AI assistant. It can generate up to 1,000 words per second. ChatGPT cannot boast such an outstanding generation speed, but its answers are more detailed and structured.
Both AI assistants excel at code analysis and generation. Mistral AI’s solution is superior to its competitor in some areas due to its in-place code execution, document scanning with OCR, and advanced tools for processing files (PDF, logs, spreadsheets, etc.). ChatGPT offers very limited coding functionality in its free plan. Its interface is less friendly to novice programmers. However, it solves complex problems well.
Le Chat and ChatGPT are great at generating high-quality images. The former is helped by Black Forest Labs' Flux Ultra model, while the latter uses integration with DALL-E 3. Both chatbots support this feature even on free plans. However, ChatGPT only allows full use of it by purchasing a paid subscription. The OpenAI product has a striking advantage – built-in LLM for video making, Sora.
Both chatbots offer free plans with limited functionality. The standard paid plan ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month. A similar plan, Le Chat Pro, costs $14.99 per month. Mistral AI pricing is attractive for students – they pay only $5.99 per month. The tariff for ChatGPT Teams is $25 per month per user. Le Chat Team is almost the same – $24.99 per month per user. Both services provide corporate plans with advanced functionality. OpenAI has it for $200 per month, and Mistral AI is ready to calculate its cost upon individual request.
Mistral AI vs. Google Gemini
Let's compare the top AI models at the time of writing: Mistral Large 2 and Gemini Advanced. Both neural networks cope with natural language recognition at a decent level. However, the Mistral's LLM significantly outperforms Gemini in this area. It is capable of processing large fragments of text at a time and generating up to 1,000 words per second.
On the other hand, Google's language model has good multilingual support. Gemini can create and translate materials in over 40 languages. Mistral can only do so in 12 languages. In addition, Google's product is multimodal: it uses combined text and image databases and independently generates visual content without the help of third-party LLMs. Mistral Large 2 uses Black Forest Labs' Flux Ultra model to generate images.
The French startup's product excels at solving logical reasoning problems. Google's chatbot excels at coding, but sometimes struggles when it comes to inventiveness and creativity. Both services feature online search, which is also available in free plans.
Mistral Large 2 can integrate with external software via data connectors and API. Gemini Advanced also has an API, and it is also built into a number of Google applications (Android OS, Docs, Gmail, Meet, Slides, and more). An important advantage of Gemini is its own library of add-ons, with which users can automate a number of tasks and processes.
The cost of Mistral Large 2 services depends on how users want to access this neural network. The first way is through the Le Chat chatbot. This can be done for free or by paying for a Pro subscription – $14.99 per month. The second way is through La Plateforme, paying $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Google also offers free access to Gemini with limited features. A paid subscription to Gemini Advanced will cost $20 per month.
Mistral AI vs. Anthropic
In conclusion, let's compare the capabilities of Mistral Large 2 with another serious representative of the AI industry – the flagship model Claude 3.7 Sonnet from the American startup Anthropic. This comparison is interesting because the compared products use different approaches to the use of artificial intelligence. The LLM from Mistral AI is focused on versatility and performance, while the model from Anthropic emphasizes moral aspects, safety, and responsibility.
In the text summarization tasks, Claude 3.7 Sonnet was the clear winner, as its answers were more detailed and information-rich. Mistral Large 2 was quite short and concise but lacked interactivity. In the code generation tasks, Mistral Large 2 again took the lead. The code it produced was shorter, clearer, and more readable without sacrificing functionality.
In the area of translation and generation of text in different languages, the winner was Claude 3.7 Sonnet. It supports more than 50 languages and better conveys the tone, style, and emotion of the text when translated.
When performing mathematical calculations, Claude produced a more concise and structured result, using formatting to improve readability. Mistral AI's response was also correct, but less well organized and contained unnecessary repetition.
Both AI products offer free plans with limited features. Claude's standard paid plan costs $18 per month. Mistral's is $14.99 per month. The team plans for both services are almost identical: $25 per user per month for Claude and $24.99 per user per month for Mistral.
Final Thoughts
The French startup Mistral AI has firmly established itself in the global AI industry, releasing a wide range of commercial and open language models. The company's products compete with market leaders in key performance indicators and attract the audience with very competitive prices. Experts predict a very promising future for Mistral AI – primarily due to the popularization of the concept of open AI, which does not limit users to proprietary licenses. Commitment to ethical transparency has made Mistral's neural networks more than just another innovation. By removing barriers to entry into the community and promoting the principles of collective development, this startup is capable of revolutionizing technological progress in the coming years.
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