Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model

French AI startup Mistral has released its first exemplary that tin process images arsenic good arsenic text.

Called Pixtral 12B, nan 12-billion-parameter exemplary is astir 24GB successful size. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models pinch more parameters generally execute amended than those pinch less parameters.

Built connected 1 of Mistral’s matter models, Nemo 12B, nan caller exemplary tin reply questions astir an arbitrary number of images of an arbitrary size fixed either URLs aliases images encoded utilizing base64, nan binary-to-text encoding scheme. Similar to different multimodal models specified arsenic Anthropic’s Claude family and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Pixtral 12B should — astatine slightest successful mentation — beryllium capable to execute tasks for illustration captioning images and counting nan number of objects successful a photo.

Available via a torrent nexus connected GitHub and AI and instrumentality learning improvement level Hugging Face, Pixtral 12B tin beryllium downloaded, fine-tuned and utilized nether an Apache 2.0 licence without restrictions. (A Mistral spokesperson confirmed nan licence being applied to Pixtral 12B via email.)

This writer wasn’t capable to return Pixtral 12B for a spin, unluckily — location weren’t immoderate moving web demos astatine nan clip of publication. In a station connected X, Sophia Yang, caput of Mistral developer relations, said Pixtral 12B will beryllium disposable for testing connected Mistral’s chatbot and API-serving platforms, Le Chat and Le Platforme, soon.

It’s unclear which image information Mistral mightiness person utilized to create Pixtral 12B.

Most generative AI models, including Mistral’s different models, are trained connected immense quantities of nationalist information from astir nan web, which is often copyrighted. Some exemplary vendors reason that “fair use” authorities entitle them to scrape any nationalist data, but galore copyright holders disagree, and person revenge lawsuits against larger vendors for illustration OpenAI and Midjourney to put a extremity to nan practice.

Pixtral 12B comes successful nan aftermath of Mistral closing a $645 cardinal backing information led by General Catalyst that valued nan institution astatine $6 billion. Just complete a twelvemonth old, Mistral — minority-owned by Microsoft — is seen by galore successful nan AI organization arsenic Europe’s reply to OpenAI. The younger company’s strategy frankincense acold has progressive releasing free “open” models, charging for managed versions of those models, and providing consulting services to firm customers.

Updated 9/11 astatine 8:11 a.m. Pacific: Clarified that Pixtral 12B is being made disposable nether an Apache 2.0 license, not Mistral’s modular dev licence that carries pinch it definite restrictions connected commercialized usage.