Mixtral : The French ChatGPT ?

Generative AI has taken another step forward with the arrival of Mixtral 8x7B, a model developed by Mistral AI. This innovation represents a major breakthrough in language models, positioning itself as a serious competitor to giants like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. But what are the distinguishing features of Mixtral, and how is this French model revolutionizing the AI landscape?

Mistral AI

Mistral AI, a Paris-based French company, was founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix.

These AI pioneers created a notable buzz in the community with the announcement of Mixtral 8x7B, boldly positioning themselves against industry giants such as OpenAI.

The evolution of Mixtral, from its early design stages to its market introduction, illustrates Mistral AI’s innovative vision and commitment to the progression of accessible, high-performance AI.

Mixtral architecture and capabilities

The Mixtral 8x7B features an innovative architecture named “mixture of experts” (MoE), a revolutionary advance in transformer models.

This model integrates eight expert models into a single frame, enabling Mixtral to achieve exceptional performance.

With an impressive ability to handle a context length of 32,000 tokens, Mixtral stands out not only for its linguistic versatility in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English, but also for its ability to perform complex programming and data analysis tasks.

This combination of adaptability and creativity positions Mixtral as a powerful tool in the AI landscape.

Accessing Mistral AI and Downloading Models

How to use Mixtral

Mistral AI offers two methods of accessing its language models, depending on your needs:

1. Access via API: Mistral AI offers a beta API for access to its latest models. To access it, simply join the waiting list and get an active subscription. Once that’s done, you can use the API to perform natural language processing tasks.
2. Downloading Model Raw Weights: Mistral AI also offers the option of downloading the raw weights of its models. This allows you to use them for stand-alone deployments, research projects, or even local deployments on consumer hardware.

Available models

Mistral AI offers several templates, the main ones being:

• Mistral 7B: This is the first dense Mistral AI model. When it was released, it rivaled models with up to 30 billion parameters.
• Mixtral 8X7B: Mixtral 8X7B is a sparse expert mixing model. It uses up to 45 billion parameters, but uses only around 12 billion during inference.

The models have different sizes, with different GPU memory requirements for inference:

• Mistral-7B-v0.2: 7.3 billion parameters, 16 GB GPU RAM minimum.
• Mistral-8X7B-v0.1: 46.7 billion parameters, 100 GB GPU RAM minimum.

You can download these templates from the Hugging Face platform.

Comparison with GPT-3.5 and Other AI Models

Mixtral 8x7B stands out in the world of large language models for its performance and its ability to handle long sequences of tokens, placing it in direct competition with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

While GPT-3.5 is renowned for its versatility and deep linguistic understanding, Mixtral shines for its inference speed and less resource-intensive approach.

In terms of cost, Mixtral offers a much more economical option, making the technology accessible to a wider range of users and applications.

The Limits of Mixtral

Although Mixtral 8x7B offers some remarkable innovations, it does have its limitations. Its smaller size, while beneficial for speed and cost, can limit its ability to handle extremely complex tasks or understand deep nuances in language, compared to larger models like GPT-4. Moreover, being relatively new, Mixtral may need time to mature and establish a solid base of use and research.

Mistral AI’s Open Source Approach

Mistral AI’s decision to make its AI models and large language models (LLMs) open source is a bold step towards the democratization of AI.

Mixtral stands out as a far-reaching language model, accessible to all. This openness is further enhanced by the model’s “Open wight” availability. This allows users to download, experiment and adapt Mixtral to their specific needs, opening up unprecedented routes for research and practical application.

Moreover, Mistral AI’s partnership with Google Cloud illustrates their commitment to open and optimized AI. Thanks to this collaboration, Mistral AI distributes optimized language models on a high-performance infrastructure, facilitating their adoption and use by a global community.

Mistral AI’s open source approach is a catalyst for more collaborative and innovative AI.

Mixtral, the best Alternative to GPT?

Whether Mixtral is the best alternative to Chat GPT, the answer depends on the user’s specific needs.

For those looking for a more affordable, less resource-intensive solution capable of handling multilingual tasks and long sequences of tokens, Mixtral is a solid option. However, for tasks requiring very deep linguistic understanding and extensive versatility, larger models like GPT-4 might be more appropriate.

Discover our article on alternatives to ChatGPT: Alternatives to Chat GPT: The best solutions for conversational AI

The Future of AI with Mixtral

Mixtral 8x7B not only represents a current breakthrough in AI, but also a springboard to the future.

Mixtral is positioned to play a crucial role in the evolution of artificial intelligence. Whether in terms of innovation in specific sectors or as a catalyst for the accessibility and democratization of AI, Mixtral’s potential is immense.

The future of AI, with models like Mixtral, promises to be exciting and revolutionary.