Meta and Mistral Released Their New Open-Source Text-Only, Not Multimodal, LLMs
Last week, Meta and Mistral launched two new open-source LLMs that are much more capable, with higher performance and better pricing.
Llama 3.1 405b is Meta's biggest model, containing 405 billion parameters. According to the company, it is competitive with leading LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Available to download or use on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Llama 3.1 405b is currently being used on WhatsApp and Meta.ai.
Like Mistral Large 2, Meta's latest model can perform various tasks, from coding and answering basic math questions to summarizing documents in eight languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai).
It's not multimodal — and neither is Mistral Large 2. It's text-only, meaning it can’t, for example, answer questions about an image.
In this regard, OpenAI is far ahead of the competition in multimodal AI systems that simultaneously process images and text.
In its announcement, the Paris-based AI startup Mistral said that Large 2 is "significantly more capable in code generation, mathematics, and reasoning, as well as provides much stronger multilingual support and advanced function calling capabilities."
"It performs on par with leading models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 405B," said Mistral.
The model has a 128,000 token window (roughly a 300-page book in a single prompt.)
Additionally, Mistral Large 2 is trained to acknowledge when it cannot find solutions or has insufficient information to provide a confident answer.
This model is available via la Plateforme under the name mistral-large-2407. It can also be used on Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Studio, and IBM Watsonx.ai. Weights for the instruct model are available and are also hosted on HuggingFace.
It is not fully open source, as any commercial application needs a paid license.
