This open-source alternative to ChatGPT just got serious

Andrew Tarantola / Mistral

French AI startup Mistral announced Monday that it is incorporating a half-dozen new features and capabilities into its free generative AI work assistant, dubbed le Chat (French for “the cat”), that will put the open-source chatbot on par with leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Le Chat can now search the web and provide cited sources, similar to what Perplexity and SearchGPT both offer. Mistral’s chatbot now also offers a Canvas feature akin to Claude’s Artifacts where users can modify and edit content and code. What’s more, le Chat can now generate images thanks to an integration with Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro, the same image generator that powers Grok-2’s capabilities.

Beyond that, le Chat can now analyze and summarize the contents of large PDF files, including any graphs and equations. The company is even rolling out AI “agents,” beating OpenAI to the punch, which can automate workflows for repetitive tasks and be shared among a company’s employees.

Many of these features are only made possible by Mistral’s new model, the 128B-parameter Pixtral Large. Built atop Mistral Large 2, this frontier model offers a 128k prompt window and state-of-the-art performance on a number of industry benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2.

“Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images,” the company wrote in its announcement post. Mistral is also debuting a new version of its flagship Mistral Large model. Version 24.11 reportedly offers improved performance in tasks that require larger amounts of context, such as document analysis.

“At Mistral, our approach to AI is different — we’re not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities,” the company wrote. “This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at affordable price points.” As such, all of the features debuting today are currently free to use for all le Chat users.

Mistral was founded in April 2023 by former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind employees. The company is currently valued at $2 billion and offers nearly a dozen different AI models for commercial and research use.

Three of the models — Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B — are open source and available to the public through Hugging Face. The Mistral Small, Medium, and Large models, conversely, are closed-source and only available through the Mistral API. Users can access both Large 24.11 and Pixtral Large with either a commercial use license or a more restrictive research license from Mistral.