French AI startup Mistral has announced the release of its latest AI model, Mistral Medium 3, which promises to deliver high performance at a lower cost than its competitors. The model is available on Mistral's API, priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $20.80 per million output tokens, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to integrate AI capabilities without breaking the bank.

Mistral Medium 3 boasts impressive performance, with the company claiming it achieves "at or above" 90% of Anthropic's costlier Claude Sonnet 3.7 model on various benchmarks. Additionally, it outperforms recent open models, including Meta's Llama 4 Maverick and Cohere's Command A, on popular AI performance evaluations. This is a significant achievement, given the model's competitive pricing.

To put the model's capabilities into perspective, a million tokens are equivalent to approximately 750,000 words, or roughly 163,000 words longer than Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace". This makes Mistral Medium 3 well-suited for tasks that require processing large amounts of data, such as coding and STEM tasks, where it excels.

The model's multimodal understanding capabilities also make it an attractive option for businesses in financial services, energy, and healthcare, where it has been beta tested for use cases like customer service, workflow automation, and analyzing complex data sets. Mistral's customers, including BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl, are likely to benefit from the model's efficiency and performance.

Mistral Medium 3 is not only available on Mistral's API but also on Amazon's Sagemaker platform, with plans to expand to other hosts, including Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex, in the near future. This will provide businesses with greater flexibility and choice when it comes to deploying the model.

The launch of Mistral Medium 3 follows the release of Mistral's Mistral Small 3.1 in March, and the company has hinted at the upcoming release of an even larger model in the coming weeks. This rapid pace of innovation is a testament to Mistral's commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development.

Founded in 2023, Mistral has already raised over €1.1 billion (approximately $1.24 billion) in funding from venture capital firms, including General Catalyst. The company's ambitious plans to build a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps, make it an exciting player to watch in the AI space.

The release of Mistral Medium 3 is likely to have significant implications for the AI industry, as it provides a cost-effective alternative to more expensive models. As AI adoption continues to grow, the availability of efficient and affordable models like Mistral Medium 3 will be crucial in driving innovation and progress in fields like customer service, workflow automation, and data analysis.