Mistral AI surfs vibe coding tailwinds with new coding models (techcrunch.com)

French AI startup Mistral has unveiled Devstral 2, a robust AI model tailored for coding, as part of its strategy to compete with larger AI labs like Anthropic. This announcement follows the release of Mistral 3's open-weight models and signifies a clear ambition to enhance its position in the AI landscape. Mistral Vibe, a new command-line interface (CLI), joins the fold, promoting code automation via natural language and offering functionalities for file manipulation, code searching, and version control, emphasizing its context-aware capabilities—a game changer for business applications. Devstral 2 stands out with its impressive 123 billion parameters, requiring significant computational resources for deployment, namely four H100 GPUs or equivalent. For more accessible usage, the smaller Devstral Small model at 24 billion parameters can run on consumer hardware. The models come with varying open-source licenses: Devstral 2 under a modified MIT license and the smaller version under Apache 2.0. Mistral has set an attractive strategy with a free usage period for Devstral 2 via their API, post which charges range from $0.40/$2.00 for Devstral 2 to $0.10/$0.30 for Devstral Small, aimed at democratizing access while navigating competitive pricing strategies.