Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model

French AI startup Mistral released Pixtral 12B, a 12-billion-parameter multimodal model capable of processing both images and text. Pixtral 12B, built upon Mistral's Nemo 12B, enables answering questions about images, image captioning and object counting. The model can be used under an Apache 2.0 license, available on GitHub and Hugging Face, without usage restrictions on commercial projects. Mistral, valued at $6 billion, is backed by Microsoft and aims to position itself as Europe’s counterpart to OpenAI.

• Pixtral 12B is Mistral's first multimodal model.
• The model boasts 12 billion parameters.
• Pixtral 12B is licensable under Apache 2.0.
• Mistral is minority owned by Microsoft.
• Mistral has recently secured $645 million in funding.