Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model

French AI startup Mistral has released its first model that can process images as well as text. Called Pixtral 12B, the 12-billion-parameter model is roughly 24GB in size. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. Built on one of Mistral’s text models, Nemo 12B, the new model can answer questions about an arbitrary number of images of an arbitrary size given either URLs or images encoded using base64, the binary-to-text encoding scheme. Similar to other multimodal models such as Anthropic’s Claude family and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Pixtral 12B should — at least in theory — be able to perform tasks like captioning images and counting the number of objects in a photo. Available via a torrent link on GitHub and AI and machine learning development platform Hugging Face, Pixtral 12B can be downloaded, fine-tuned and used under an Apache 2.0 license without restrictions. (A Mistral spokesperson confirmed the license being applied to Pixtral 12B via email.) This writer wasn’t able to take Pixtral 12B for a spin, unfortunately — there weren’t any working web demos at the time of publication. In a post on X, Sophia Yang, head of Mistral developer relations, said Pixtral 12B will be available for testing on Mistral’s chatbot and API-serving platforms, Le Chat and Le Platforme, soon. It’s unclear which image data Mistral might have used to develop Pixtral 12B. Most generative AI models, including Mistral’s other models, are trained on vast qu

Full report : Mistral releases its first multimodal model, Pixtral 12B, available on GitHub and Hugging Face, and via API-serving platforms Le Chat and Le Platforme “soon.”