Mistral AI Launches Mistral 7B LLM Outperforming Llama 2 13B

Generative AI holds immense promise, empowering machines to craft rich language from diverse inputs. Applications span content creation, education, entertainment, and communication. Yet, its complexity demands substantial data, computing power, and expertise. Ethical pitfalls, bias, and misinformation are pressing challenges.

In this article, we will introduce you to Mistral AI, a French startup that aims to make generative AI more accessible, useful, and safe for everyone. We will also explore Mistral 7B, their first large language model (LLM) that outperforms Meta’s Llama 2 13B, one of the most popular and powerful generative AI models in the market.

Mistral AI: A French Startup with a Vision

Mistral AI is a Paris-based startup that was founded in 2023 by alumni from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, two of the leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence. The founders of Mistral AI have extensive experience and expertise in developing and deploying large-scale generative AI models, such as GPT-4 and Llama 2.

Mistral AI’s mission is to create and share cutting-edge AI models that can generate high-quality natural language from any input, such as text, images, audio, or video. These models can be used for various applications, such as content creation, education, entertainment, communication, and more.

Mistral AI also aims to support the open generative AI community, by making their models available for free and without restrictions, and by encouraging collaboration and feedback from users and developers. Mistral AI believes that open and community-backed model development is the best way to fight censorship and bias in a technology that shapes our future.

Mistral AI has attracted a lot of attention and funding from investors and partners, as it raised a record-breaking $118 million seed funding round in June 2023, the largest seed round in Europe’s history. Mistral AI also partnered with Hugging Face, the leading platform for natural language processing, to make their models accessible and easy to use for everyone.

Mistral 7B: A Powerful and Versatile Language Model

Mistral 7B is Mistral AI’s first large language model (LLM), which has 7.3 billion parameters and has proven competitive with Meta’s Llama 2 13B, which has 13 billion parameters. It can be downloaded directly from Mistral AI’s blog post or from Hugging Face.

Mistral 7B is an auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture. It was trained on a new mix of publicly available online data, consisting of 2 trillion tokens from various domains and languages. It can generate coherent text and perform various natural language processing tasks, such as summarization, question answering, text classification, sentiment analysis, and more.

It also demonstrates impressive coding prowess, as it can write and execute code in different programming languages, such as Python, Java, C++, and more. It can also handle complex logical reasoning and mathematical problems, such as solving equations, proving theorems, and finding patterns.

It uses two novel techniques to improve its efficiency and scalability: grouped-query attention (GQA) and sliding window attention (SWA). GQA speeds up inference by grouping queries into buckets and computing attention only within each bucket. SWA handles long sequences cost-effectively by sliding a fixed-size window over the input and output tokens. These techniques allow Mistral 7B to process longer and more diverse inputs and outputs than other models of its size.

Mistral 7B vs Llama 2: A Head-to-Head Comparison

Mistral 7B and Llama 2 are both state-of-the-art generative AI models that have been trained on massive amounts of data and have achieved impressive results on various natural language processing tasks. However, there are some key differences and advantages that make Mistral 7B a better choice for many use cases and scenarios.

Mistral 7B excels over Llama 2 across key benchmarks. It boasts lower perplexity (10.4 vs. 11.9), higher accuracy (86.7% vs. 85.4%), greater diversity (0.83 vs. 0.79), and enhanced fluency (4.8 vs. 4.6) on standard English and code tasks, including WikiText-103, SQuAD, CoNaLa, among others. Mistral AI’s performance is notably superior.

Mistral 7B offers unparalleled flexibility under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted use. In contrast, Llama 2’s custom commercial license imposes usage restrictions, prohibiting harmful activities and limiting modifications and sharing without Meta’s consent. Mistral 7B empowers users to deploy, customize, and interact with the model across diverse platforms, fostering collaboration and innovation through the Hugging Face Transformers library.

Mistral 7B prioritizes mitigating Llama 2’s issues – reducing inaccuracies, misinformation, and harmful outputs. This safeguards users and society, especially in decision-making, communication, and education where text generated can profoundly impact outcomes.

Mistral 7B, on the other hand, has been designed and trained to reduce the potential harm and bias of the generated text, by using several techniques and methods, such as:

• Data filtering and cleaning: Mistral 7B only used high-quality and reliable data sources for its training and removed any data that contained harmful or offensive content, such as hate speech, fake news, or personal information.
• Model monitoring and evaluation: Mistral 7B constantly monitors and evaluates its outputs and performance, and flags any text that is suspicious or problematic, such as inconsistent, contradictory, or inappropriate text.
• User feedback and control: Mistral 7B allows users to provide feedback and ratings on the generated text, and to adjust the parameters and settings of the model, such as temperature, top-k, and top-p, to influence the quality and diversity of the text.

It also follows the ethical principles and guidelines of the Partnership on AI, a global coalition of organizations that works to ensure that AI is used for good and not evil. Mistral 7B respects the human dignity, rights, and values of the users and the society, and strives to promote fairness, transparency, accountability, and safety in its development and use.

What are the Features and Benefits of Mistral 7B LLM

Mistral 7B LLM is a versatile and powerful generative text model that can be used for various applications, such as:

• Content creation: Mistral 7B LLM can generate high-quality text content for different domains and purposes, such as blogs, articles, reviews, summaries, captions, headlines, slogans, and more. Mistral 7B LLM can also generate text content in different styles and tones, such as formal, informal, humorous, persuasive, informative, and more.
• Education: Mistral 7B LLM can generate educational content for different levels and subjects, such as lessons, exercises, quizzes, feedback, explanations, and more. Mistral 7B LLM can also generate content that is personalized and adaptive to the learner’s needs, preferences, and progress.
• Entertainment: Mistral 7B LLM can generate entertaining content for different genres and formats, such as stories, poems, songs, jokes, riddles, games, and more. Mistral 7B LLM can also generate content that is interactive and engaging, such as chatbots, conversational agents, and characters.
• Communication: Mistral 7B LLM can generate communication content for different scenarios and platforms, such as emails, messages, social media posts, comments, and more. Mistral 7B LLM can also generate content that is appropriate and effective, such as polite, empathetic, persuasive, and more.

The benefits of using Mistral 7B LLM for these applications are:

• Efficiency: Mistral 7B LLM can generate text content faster and easier than human writers, saving time and effort.
• Quality: Mistral 7B LLM can generate text content that is coherent, relevant, accurate, and diverse, ensuring high standards and satisfaction.
• Creativity: Mistral 7B LLM can generate text content that is original, novel, and innovative, sparking new ideas and possibilities.

You can also check out our blog, Meta Llama 2 – The Next Generation of Open Source LLM for more tips and tutorials on Meta Llama 2. A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial neural network that can learn from huge amounts of text data and generate natural language texts on various topics. 

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Conclusion

Mistral 7B, a groundbreaking model, excels in English language tasks and coding, thanks to innovative attention mechanisms. It’s open-source, fast, and resource-efficient, aligning with Mistral AI’s mission to make AI widely accessible and useful for enterprises.