Mistral AI is a European AI company, founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothee Lacroix. It trains large language models (neural networks that read and generate text) and releases many of them as open-weight models, which means the trained model files can be downloaded and run outside Mistral's own servers.
The models cover general tasks and coding (Mistral Large, Mistral Medium and Mistral Small), document OCR (reading text from scanned pages) and speech (Voxtral). A developer calls them through the API with a key from Mistral Studio, which is also used to build and govern agents and applications. Forge customizes models with an organization's own data, and Vibe is an assistant for research, coding and everyday tasks. The models run on Mistral's cloud, in a customer's VPC (virtual private cloud) or on the customer's own servers.
The API is billed by usage: most models are priced per million input and output tokens, OCR per 1,000 pages and speech per minute. Vibe has a free plan and monthly subscriptions for individuals and teams.