The beta Canvas feature on MistralMistral, a French AI startup, has significantly enhanced its free generative AI assistant, Le Chat, with several new features that rival leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic. These updates position Le Chat as a powerful open-source alternative in the competitive chatbot landscape.
Web Search and Citations
Le Chat now offers web search capabilities with cited sources, similar to Perplexity and SearchGPT. This feature enhances the chatbot’s ability to provide accurate and verifiable information, boosting its credibility and usefulness for research and information retrieval.
Canvas Feature for Content Editing
Similar to Claude’s Artifacts, Le Chat introduces a Canvas feature. This allows users to directly modify and edit generated content and code, offering a more interactive and dynamic user experience for refining outputs and customizing results.
Image Generation with Flux Pro Integration
Integrating Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro, the same image generator powering Grok-2, Le Chat now has image generation capabilities. This expands the chatbot’s creative potential, allowing users to generate visuals alongside text-based content.
PDF Analysis and Summarization
Le Chat can now analyze and summarize large PDF files, including complex content such as graphs and equations. This feature is particularly useful for professionals and researchers who need to quickly extract key information from lengthy documents.
AI Agents for Automated Workflows
Introducing AI “agents,” Le Chat enables the automation of repetitive tasks. These agents can be shared among company employees, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency. This feature precedes OpenAI’s similar offering.
Mistral's new AI model Pixtral Large
Introducing the Pixtral Large Model
These new features are powered by Mistral’s new 128B-parameter model, Pixtral Large. Built upon Mistral Large 2, this model boasts a 128k prompt window and state-of-the-art performance on industry benchmarks like MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2. Pixtral Large is specifically designed to understand documents, charts, and natural images.
Updated Mistral Large Model (Version 24.11)
Alongside Pixtral Large, Mistral also released an updated version of its flagship Mistral Large model (version 24.11). This version offers improved performance in tasks requiring larger contexts, such as document analysis.
Mistral’s Approach to AI
Mistral emphasizes its focus on providing users with accessible and affordable frontier AI capabilities rather than solely pursuing artificial general intelligence. This approach allows them to offer these new features free to all Le Chat users.
About Mistral
Founded in April 2023 by former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind employees, Mistral is currently valued at $2 billion. The company offers a range of AI models for commercial and research purposes, including several open-source models available through Hugging Face (Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B). Closed-source models like Mistral Small, Medium, Large, Large 24.11, and Pixtral Large are accessible via the Mistral API with commercial or research licenses.
Conclusion
Mistral’s latest updates to Le Chat significantly enhance its capabilities, bringing it closer to the functionality offered by leading commercial chatbots. By offering these advanced features for free and focusing on user accessibility, Mistral is making a significant contribution to the open-source AI landscape. These advancements position Le Chat as a strong competitor in the rapidly evolving generative AI market.
