Featured image
Large Language Model

Mistral 7B is the first LLM by Mistral AI and it outperforms Llama 13B and others

avatar

Sven

September 28th, 2023

~ 4 min read

The tech world is buzzing with excitement as Mistral AI team announces the release of Mistral 7B, their latest and most powerful language model to date. With impressive performance and innovative features, Mistral 7B is set to revolutionize the way we interact with language models. In this blog post, we'll dive into the details of Mistral 7B and explore its capabilities, benchmarks, and unique advantages. So, let's explore the world of Mistral 7B and discover why it's generating such a buzz among tech enthusiasts.

Mistral 7B: Unveiling the Powerhouse

Mistral 7B is a game-changer in the field of language models, boasting an impressive 7.3 billion parameter model. This powerful model outperforms the renowned Llama 2 13B model on all benchmarks and even surpasses Llama 1 34B on various benchmarks. It brings together the best of both worlds by excelling in English tasks while also demonstrating remarkable performance in code-related tasks.

Key Features for Enhanced Performance

Mistral 7B utilizes Grouped-query attention (GQA) for faster inference, enabling efficient processing of queries. Additionally, it leverages Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to handle longer sequences at a smaller cost, optimizing computational efficiency without compromising performance.

https://mistral.ai/images/news/announcing-mistral-7b/230927_bars.png

Free to Use: Apache 2.0 License

One of the most exciting aspects of Mistral 7B is that it is released under the Apache 2.0 license, making it accessible to all users without any restrictions. Whether you want to use it locally with the reference implementation, deploy it on popular cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure using vLLM inference server and skypilot, or leverage it on HuggingFace, Mistral 7B offers flexibility and ease of use.

Easy Fine-Tuning and Impressive Results

Mistral 7B is designed to be easily fine-tuned on any task, enabling users to tailor it to their specific needs. As a demonstration of its capabilities, Mistral AI team provides a model that has been fine-tuned for chat, surpassing Llama 2 13B in chat performance. This showcases the versatility and potential of Mistral 7B for various applications.

Performance Evaluation: Outshining the Competition

In rigorous performance evaluations, Mistral 7B proves its superiority over the Llama 2 family of models. It outperforms Llama 2 13B across a wide range of benchmarks, showcasing its exceptional performance in multiple categories such as commonsense reasoning, world knowledge, reading comprehension, math, and code.

Unveiling the Metrics: Cost vs. Performance

To provide a comprehensive understanding of Mistral 7B's capabilities, an interesting metric called "equivalent model sizes" is introduced. This metric showcases how Mistral 7B performs equivalently to a Llama 2 model that is more than three times its size in reasoning, comprehension, and STEM reasoning benchmarks. This efficiency translates into significant memory savings and increased throughput.

Flash and Furious: Attention Drift

Mistral 7B incorporates a sliding window attention (SWA) mechanism, which enables each layer to attend to previous hidden states. This innovation, inspired by FlashAttention and xFormers, results in a two-fold speed improvement for longer sequences while maintaining high-quality results. The attention span limitation also allows for efficient cache usage, further optimizing memory consumption during inference.

Fine-Tuning for Chat: Unleashing the Potential

Mistral 7B's fine-tuning capabilities are exemplified through the fine-tuned model for chat, aptly named Mistral 7B Instruct. This model, trained on publicly available instruction datasets, showcases remarkable performance and generalization. Without relying on proprietary data or tricks, Mistral 7B Instruct surpasses other 7B models in MT-Bench and rivals 13B chat models.

Acknowledging the Collaborators

The Mistral AI team extends their gratitude to CoreWeave, CINECA/EuroHPC team, FlashAttention, vLLM, xFormers, Skypilot, HuggingFace, AWS, GCP, Azure ML, and many others for their invaluable contributions and support in making Mistral 7B a reality.

Conclusion:

Mistral 7B has raised the bar for language models with its unmatched performance, innovative features, and ease of use. Its release under the Apache 2.0 license ensures accessibility for all users, while its fine-tuning capabilities open up endless possibilities for customization. Whether you're a developer looking to optimize code-related tasks or a language enthusiast seeking accurate and efficient results, Mistral 7B is a game-changer. Stay tuned as Mistral AI continues to push the boundaries of AI technology and deliver groundbreaking solutions.

Links:
Download Model
GitHub Repo
HuggingFace Repo
Mistral AI Announcement