Mistral Devstral AI: New Coding Model Released

Mistral Introduces Devstral: A New AI Model for Coding

AI innovator Mistral announced the release of Devstral on Wednesday, a newly developed AI model specifically designed for coding tasks.

Development and Licensing

Devstral was created in collaboration with All Hands AI and is openly accessible under the Apache 2.0 license. This permissive licensing allows for unrestricted commercial utilization.

Mistral asserts that Devstral demonstrates superior performance compared to other open-source models, such as Google’s Gemma 3 27B and DeepSeek’s V3, as measured by the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark.

Key Capabilities and Deployment

According to Mistral, Devstral is particularly adept at utilizing tools for codebase exploration, editing multiple files simultaneously, and powering software engineering agents.

The model is designed to function with code agent frameworks like OpenHands or SWE-Agent, defining the interaction between the model and testing procedures.

Devstral is lightweight enough to operate on a single Nvidia RTX 4090 or a Mac equipped with 32GB of RAM, making it suitable for local deployment and on-device applications.

The Growing Landscape of AI Coding Assistants

The arrival of Devstral coincides with the increasing popularity of AI coding assistants and the underlying models that power them.

JetBrains recently released its first open AI model for coding, and other AI companies, including Google, Windsurf, and OpenAI, have also unveiled both open and proprietary models optimized for programming.

Challenges and Adoption of AI in Coding

Despite advancements, AI models still encounter difficulties in generating high-quality, secure software. Weaknesses in understanding programming logic can lead to vulnerabilities and errors.

However, the potential for increased coding productivity is driving rapid adoption among companies and developers. A recent survey indicated that 76% of developers either used or planned to use AI tools in their workflows last year.

From Codestral to Devstral

Mistral previously released Codestral, a generative model for code, but it was not licensed for commercial use.

The previous license explicitly prohibited internal usage by employees within a company’s business operations.

Availability and Pricing

Devstral, currently offered as a “research preview,” can be downloaded from AI development platforms like Hugging Face and accessed through Mistral’s API.

Pricing is set at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens. A million tokens equates to approximately 750,000 words.

Future Developments

Mistral is actively developing a larger, more advanced agentic coding model, expected to be released in the coming weeks.

Devstral itself features 24 billion parameters, which generally correlate with problem-solving capabilities; models with more parameters typically exhibit better performance.

About Mistral

Founded in 2023, Mistral is a leading AI model lab focused on building a range of AI-powered services, including the chatbot platform Le Chat and mobile applications.

The company has secured over €1.1 billion (approximately $1.24 billion) in funding from investors like General Catalyst.

Mistral’s clientele includes prominent organizations such as BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl.

Recent Launches

Devstral represents Mistral’s third product launch this month.

The company recently introduced Mistral Medium 3, an efficient general-purpose model, and Le Chat Enterprise, a corporate chatbot service with features like an AI agent builder and integration with services like Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.