Mistral, a Microsoft-backed French AI startup valued at $6 billion, release The first generative AI model for coding: “Codestral”.
Codestral, like other code generation models, is designed to help developers write and work with code. According to a Mistral blog post, the model has been trained on more than 80 programming languages, including Python, Java, C++, and JavaScript. Codestral can complete coding features, write tests, and “fill in” partial code, as well as answer English questions about your codebase.
Mistral describes its model as “open,” but that’s debatable. The startup’s license allows anyone to share Codestral and its output with anyone. Any Commercial activities. There is an exception for “development,” but it is conditional, and the license explicitly prohibits “internal use by employees in the context of the company’s business activities.”
The reason for this may be that Codestral was partially trained on copyrighted content – something Mistral didn’t confirm or deny in its blog post, but it’s not surprising. evidence The startup’s previous training dataset contained copyrighted data.
Either way, Codestral may not be worth the trouble: You’ll need a powerful PC to run its model, which has 22 billion parameters (parameters essentially define an AI model’s skill for a problem like analyzing or generating text), and it beats the competition in some benchmarks (which, as you know, are unreliable), but not by a huge margin.
While Codestral is impractical for most developers and only incremental in terms of performance improvements, it is sure to stimulate debate about the wisdom of relying on code-generation models as programming assistants.
Developers are adopting generative AI tools for at least some of their coding tasks. Stack Overflow vote As of June 2023, 44% of developers say they are already using AI tools in their development process, and 26% plan to do so in the near future. But these tools have clear flaws.
GitClear analyzed over 150 million lines of code committed to project repositories over the past few years and found that Generative AI development tools are leading to an increase in erroneous code Security researchers say that such tools are Amplify existing bugs or security issues in your software projectsOpenAI’s ChatGPT is said to give incorrect answers to more than half of programming questions. Purdue University Study.
That hasn’t stopped companies like Mistral from trying to monetize (and capture mindshare) the model. This morning, Mistral released a hosted version of Codestral on its Le Chat conversational AI platform, in addition to a paid API. Mistral said it’s also working to integrate Codestral into app frameworks and development environments, including LlamaIndex, LangChain, Continue.dev and Tabnine.