Mistral AI Releases Mistral Small v24.09, Free API Tier, and Pixtral 12B Vision on le Chat with Broad Price Cuts
Mistral AI announced a multi-part release on September 17, 2024: a free tier for la Plateforme API, significant price reductions across its model family (up to 80% for Mistral Small and Codestral), an updated Mistral Small v24.09 (22B parameters, improved alignment and reasoning), and the availability of Pixtral 12B vision capabilities on le Chat. Pixtral 12B, released under Apache 2.0, supports images of any size without text performance degradation and is now accessible for free on le Chat. The pricing updates also apply to cloud partner deployments on Azure AI Studio, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI.
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Mistral AI Launches Major le Chat Update with Web Search, Canvas, Pixtral Large, and Image Generation
Mistral AI has announced a significant expansion of its le Chat assistant with several new capabilities in beta: web search with citations, a Canvas interface for collaborative document and code creation, multimodal document and image understanding powered by the new Pixtral Large model, and image generation via a partnership with Black Forest Labs (Flux Pro). The update also introduces shareable task agents for workflow automation and speculative editing for faster responses. All new features are currently offered on a free tier, positioning le Chat as a direct competitor to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
Mistral Launches Medium 3.5 (128B Open Weights), Remote Cloud Coding Agents in Vibe, and Work Mode in Le Chat
Mistral AI has released Mistral Medium 3.5, a 128B dense open-weights model with a 256k context window, configurable reasoning effort, and a vision encoder trained from scratch, scoring 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified. Alongside the model, Mistral is launching remote cloud-based coding agents in its Vibe CLI and Le Chat interface, enabling async parallel coding sessions that run independently and notify users on completion. A new Work mode in Le Chat provides a multi-step agentic interface for cross-tool workflows including email, calendar, research, and issue tracking. Mistral Medium 3.5 replaces Devstral 2 as the default model in both Le Chat and the Vibe CLI, and is available for self-hosting on as few as four GPUs under a modified MIT license.
Mistral Medium 3: Frontier-Class Performance at 8x Lower Cost
Mistral AI has released Mistral Medium 3, a new enterprise-focused language model priced at $0.4/$2 per million input/output tokens. The model claims to achieve 90%+ of Claude Sonnet 3.7's benchmark performance while undercutting cost leaders like DeepSeek v3, and outperforming open models including Llama 4 Maverick. It supports hybrid, on-premises, and in-VPC deployment on as few as four GPUs, and is available immediately on Mistral La Plateforme and Amazon SageMaker, with additional cloud platforms coming soon. The announcement also teases an upcoming large open-weights model release.
Mistral AI Launches La Plateforme: First API Endpoints in Early Access
Mistral AI opened beta access to its first developer platform, La Plateforme, offering three generative text endpoints (mistral-tiny, mistral-small, mistral-medium) and an embedding endpoint. Mistral-tiny serves Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, mistral-small serves Mixtral 8x7B, and mistral-medium serves an unreleased prototype model scoring 8.6 on MT-Bench. The platform also introduces Mistral-embed with a 1024-dimension embedding model achieving 55.26 on MTEB. The API follows OpenAI-compatible chat interface specifications and is ramping toward general availability.
Mistral AI Announces Fine-Tuning for Flagship Models, Agents Alpha, and SDK 1.0
Mistral AI has announced three platform updates: fine-tuning support for all flagship and specialist models on La Plateforme (including Mistral Large 2 and Codestral), an alpha release of an Agents feature enabling custom workflows via Le Chat or API, and a stable 1.0 release of the mistralai Python and TypeScript SDK. Fine-tuning supports base prompts, few-shot prompting, and full fine-tuning with custom datasets. The Agents feature is described as early-stage, with tool and data-source integrations planned.
Mistral Small 4: Unified Multimodal, Reasoning, and Coding MoE Model Released Under Apache 2.0
Mistral AI has released Mistral Small 4, a 119B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model (6B active per token) that unifies capabilities previously split across Magistral (reasoning), Pixtral (multimodal), and Devstral (coding agents) into a single open-weights model. The model features a 256k context window, configurable reasoning effort via a `reasoning_effort` parameter, native text and image input support, and is released under Apache 2.0. Mistral claims 40% latency reduction and 3x throughput improvement over Mistral Small 3, with benchmark results showing competitive performance against GPT-OSS 120B and Qwen models while producing significantly shorter outputs. The release includes day-0 availability as an NVIDIA NIM and support across vLLM, llama.cpp, SGLang, and Transformers.
Pixtral Large: Mistral AI's 124B Open-Weights Multimodal Model
Mistral AI released Pixtral Large, a 124B open-weights multimodal model built on Mistral Large 2, featuring a 1B parameter vision encoder and 128K context window supporting at least 30 high-resolution images. The model claims state-of-the-art results on MathVista, DocVQA, and ChartQA, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro on several benchmarks, and leads the LMSys Vision Leaderboard among open-weights models by ~50 ELO points. Simultaneously, Mistral updated its text model to Mistral Large 24.11 with improvements in long-context understanding, function calling, and RAG/agentic workflows. Note: the model has since been deprecated and replaced by newer Mistral vision models.
Mistral AI Releases Mistral Large, Claims Second-Best API Model After GPT-4
Mistral AI has released Mistral Large, its most capable model to date, claiming second place among API-accessible models behind GPT-4 on standard benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, and coding/math evals. The model features a 32K context window, native fluency in five European languages, function calling, and constrained output mode. Simultaneously, Mistral is launching a new Mistral Small optimized for latency, restructuring its endpoint lineup, and announcing Microsoft Azure as its first major distribution partner. This marks Mistral's first significant commercial partnership and expansion beyond its own infrastructure.