Mistral and Nvidia drop a new open-source LLM that's small but mighty.

Mistral's latest AI model, NeMo, is here to shake things up. It's small but mighty, packing a 128k context window and some impressive multilingual skills. Oh, and it's open-source. Time to get coding!

What's going on here?

Mistral AI, in cahoots with NVIDIA, released a new open-source language model called Mistral NeMo.

What does this mean?

Mistral NeMo is kinda big (12B parameters) compared to its peers (Gemma 2 9B and Llama 3 8B). But Mistral thinks that local machines can still run it and get actual stuff done, not just use open-source as a play toy.

• It's got a massive 128k token context window (that's a lot of room for chat)

• Performs like a champ on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks

• Speaks a bunch of languages fluently (not just English, folks)

• Uses a fancy new tokenizer called Tekken that's super efficient with different languages and code

• Comes in both pre-trained and instruction-tuned flavors

• Licensed under Apache 2.0, so it's free for research and commercial use

Oh, and it's quantization-aware, meaning you can run it in FP8 without losing performance. Nerdy, but cool. It’s available at the usual places like HuggingFace and Mistral’s La Plateforme, as well as as a package on Nvidia’s NIM microservice.

Why should I care?

If you're into AI (and who isn't these days?), this is big news. Mistral NeMo brings near top-tier performance in a smaller, more efficient package. This means:

• Easier and cheaper to run for smaller companies and researchers

• Better multilingual support for global applications

• Potential for more diverse and creative AI applications due to its open-source nature.

For developers, it's a drop-in replacement for Mistral 7B, so upgrading should be a breeze. And for the open-source AI community, it's another step towards democratizing powerful language models. Time to play with some new toys!