French AI startup Mistral today launched Devstral 2, a new generation of its AI model designed for coding, as the company seeks to catch up to bigger AI labs like 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 intent to close in on its bigger and better-funded AI rivals.

The unicorn is also jumping into 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, version control, and command execution.

Mistral AI is betting on the added value of context awareness, which is particularly relevant in business use cases. Similar to its AI assistant, Le Chat, which canremember previous conversations with users and use that context to guide its answers, Vibe CLI features persistent history, and can also scan file structures and Git statuses to build context to inform its behavior.

This focus on production-grade 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, which, at 24 billion parameters, makes it deployable locally on consumer hardware.

The models differ in their open-source licensing — Devstral 2 ships under a modified MIT license, while Devstral Small uses Apache 2.0.

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

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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 inside the IDE.

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

Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.

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