French AI startup Mistral announced Monday that it is incorporating a half-dozen new features and capabilities into its free generative AI work assistant, dubbed le Chat (French for “the cat”), that will put the open-source chatbot on par with leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Le Chat can now search the web and provide cited sources, similar to what Perplexity and SearchGPT both offer. Mistral’s chatbot now also offers a Canvas feature akin to Claude’s Artifacts where users can modify and edit content and code. What’s more, le Chat can now generate images thanks to an integration with Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro, the same image generator that powers Grok-2’s capabilities.
Beyond that, le Chat can now analyze and summarize the contents of large PDF files, including any graphs and equations. The company is even rolling out AI “agents,” beating OpenAI to the punch, which can automate workflows for repetitive tasks and be shared among a company’s employees.
Many of these features are only made possible by Mistral’s new model, the 128B-parameter Pixtral Large. Built atop Mistral Large 2, this frontier model offers a 128k prompt window and state-of-the-art performance on a number of industry benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2.
“Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images,” the company wrote in its announcement post. Mistral is also debuting a new version of its flagship Mistral Large model. Version 24.11 reportedly offers improved performance in tasks that require larger amounts of context, such as document analysis.
“At Mistral, our approach to AI is different — we’re not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities,” the company wrote. “This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at affordable price points.” As such, all of the features debuting today are currently free to use for all le Chat users.
Mistral was founded in April 2023 by former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind employees. The company is currently valued at $2 billion and offers nearly a dozen different AI models for commercial and research use.
Three of the models — Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B — are open source and available to the public through Hugging Face. The Mistral Small, Medium, and Large models, conversely, are closed-source and only available through the Mistral API. Users can access both Large 24.11 and Pixtral Large with either a commercial use license or a more restrictive research license from Mistral.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.