Meta has competition

Happy Monday! Another week means even more incredible product launches. In today’s highlight, I’m diving into Mistral's latest AI launch. But before that…

Some headlines: 

⌚ Casio launched a retro-inspired step-tracking watch for $56. 

📺 Apple is looking at potentially adding an ad-supported tier to Apple TV.

🍎 Apple plans to debut Apple Intelligence a few weeks after the iOS18 launch.

When it rains, it pours, and if last week is anything to go by, it’s absolutely pouring AI launches. It all kicked off with Meta launching the largest open-source model yet, with a whopping 405 billion parameters. Next on the scene was OpenAI, which, out of nowhere, dropped SearchGPT—the company’s AI-powered alternative to Google. 

Now Mistral, the French AI startup that recently raised $645 million, wants to steal the spotlight with its latest launch, Mistral Large 2, the company’s newest flagship AI model. The team insists that Large 2 is on par with and can surpass OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama 405B when it comes to math, code generation, and reasoning. 

To put the new model’s capabilities into perspective, Large 2 seemingly outpaces Llama 3.1 when it comes to code generation and math despite only shipping with a third of the parameters, 123 billion to be exact. Of course, AI benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. 

According to the launch announcement, Mistral set their sights on a specific issue that has been plaguing AI models for months now: Hallucinations. You’re probably familiar with the phenomenon if you use any LLM regularly. Oftentimes, they can respond with totally made-up answers to even basic prompts. The company insists that Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, coming clean when it doesn’t know something rather than making something up. 

Unlike its biggest AI competitors, Large 2 isn’t multimodal, meaning it can’t understand, analyze, and create information from different types of inputs like voice, video, and images. As it stands right now, Large 2 is text-only. If you’d like to test it out, it’s available now on Google’s Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, and more. 

DEVELOPER TOOLS

BentoHub is an app that lets you create a bento grid for your GitHub profile readme. Provide some info and images, save your grid, then copy and paste the markdown or HTML code into your profile readme to make it look awesome.

Devlopea is a social media platform designed for developers to share short, impactful posts. Create content with code snippets, Excalidraw diagrams, Figma files, YouTube videos, and equations.

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS 

Notion Expert is an AI-powered tool designed to help users maximize their productivity within the Notion app by offering advanced tips, organizing strategies, and automation support.

OFFLIGHT combines all of your productivity tools into one app so nore context switching. You can manage your to-dos, time-tracking, and scheduling within one dashboard.

FUN TOOLS

CodeFlexis a platform that turns your coding achievements into a shareable, visual story. You can also compete with other developers to see who ships more. 

Brat Generator lets you generate a Charli XCX-inspired image just by typing a prompt and selecting a color.

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