Mistral AI introduced Mistral 7B in September 2023, a robust language model boasting 7.3 billion parameters. This model surpasses Llama 2 13B across all benchmarks and rivals CodeLlama 7B in code-related tasks while excelling in English language applications. Innovative features like Grouped-query Attention (GQA) for accelerated inference and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) for efficient handling of longer text sequences contribute to its balanced performance.
Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Mistral 7B offers unrestricted usage. It supports local implementation with a reference setup, cloud deployment via vLLM inference server and skypilot, or integration with platforms like HuggingFace. Its ease of fine-tuning facilitates adaptation to various tasks, with Mistral AI providing a chat-focused fine-tuned model that outperforms Llama 2 13B.
Mistral 7B represents a significant advancement in language modeling, combining state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks with accessibility and flexibility in deployment and customization.
