Mistral AI surfs with the wind at its back with new coding models | TechCrunch

French AI startup Mistral today launched Devstral 2, a new generation of its AI model designed for coding, as the company looks to catch up with larger AI labs such as Anthropic and other coding-focused LLMs.

This announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and confirms Mistral’s intention to include its larger and better-funded AI rivals.

The unicorn is also joining the ‘vibe-coding’ race that has fueled the rise of companies like Cursor and Supabase with Mistral Vibe, a new command-line interface (CLI) aimed at facilitating code automation through natural language, with tools for file manipulation, code searching, versioning and command execution.

Mistral AI focuses on the added value of context awareness, which is especially relevant in business use cases. Similar to its AI assistant, Le Chat, which can do that remember previous conversations with users and use that context to drive the responses, Vibe CLI has a persistent history and can also scan file structures and Git states to build context to inform its behavior.

This focus on production-level workflows also explains why Devstral 2 is relatively demanding, requiring at least four H100 GPUs or equivalent for deployment and weighing 123 billion parameters. However, the model is also available in a smaller size with Devstral Small, making it locally deployable on consumer hardware with 24 billion parameters.

The models differ in their open source licenses: Devstral 2 is shipped under a custom MIT license, while Devstral Small uses Apache 2.0.

They also differ in price. Devstral 2 is currently free to use via the company’s API. After the free period, the API price will be $0.40/$2.00 per million tokens (input/output) for Devstral 2, and $0.10/$0.30 for Devstral Small.

Mistral has partnered with agent tools Kilo Code and Cline to release Devstral 2 to users, while Mistral Vibe CLI is available as an extension in Zed for use within the IDE.

Mistral, Europe’s champion AI lab, is currently valued at €11.7 billion (approximately $13.8 billion) following a Series C funding round led by the Dutch semiconductor company ASMLwhich invested €1.3 billion (about $1.5 billion) in September.