Source URL: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/11/pixtral/#atom-everything
Source: Simon Willison’s Weblog
Title: Pixtral 12B
Feedly Summary: Pixtral 12B
Pixtral 12B
Mistral finally have a multi-model (image + text) vision LLM!
I linked to their tweet, but there’s not much to see there – in now classic Mistral style they released the new model with an otherwise unlabeled link to a torrent download. A more useful link is mistral-community/pixtral-12b-240910 on Hugging Face, a 25GB “Unofficial Mistral Community” copy of the weights.
Pixtral was announced at Mistral’s AI Summit event in San Francisco today. It has 128,000 token context, is Apache 2.0 licensed and handles 1024×1024 pixel images. They claim it’s particularly good for OCR and information extraction. It’s not available on their La Platforme hosted API yet, but that’s coming soon.
A few more details can be found in the release notes for mistral-common 1.4.0. That’s their open source library of code for working with the models – it doesn’t actually run inference, but it includes the all-important tokenizer, which now includes three new special tokens: [IMG], [IMG_BREAK] and [IMG_END].
Tags: vision-llms, mistral, generative-ai, ai, llms
AI Summary and Description: Yes
Summary: The text discusses the release of Pixtral 12B, a novel multi-model vision language model (LLM) from Mistral, adept at handling both text and images. This development is noteworthy for AI and machine learning practitioners, especially for its contextual capabilities and its focus on OCR and information extraction.
Detailed Description:
– **Overview of Pixtral 12B**: The text outlines the launch of Pixtral 12B at Mistral’s AI Summit in San Francisco, highlighting its capabilities as a multi-model that integrates image and text processing.
– **Key Features**:
– **Context Length**: Supports a vast context of 128,000 tokens.
– **Image Handling**: Capable of processing images up to 1024×1024 pixels.
– **Licensing**: Made available under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting openness and collaboration.
– **Technical Capabilities**:
– The model is designed to excel in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and information extraction tasks, making it valuable for applications requiring high accuracy in text recognition from images.
– **Access and Availability**:
– Current availability through an “Unofficial Mistral Community” copy on Hugging Face, with a planned integration into Mistral’s hosted API platform, indicating ongoing support and expansion.
– **Supporting Library**:
– Introduction of the mistral-common 1.4.0 library, which provides essential tools for working with these models, including new special tokens for better image processing integrations.
– New tokens include:
– **[IMG]**: Indicates the start of an image.
– **[IMG_BREAK]**: Serves as a separator within image data.
– **[IMG_END]**: Marks the end of the image input.
– **Implications for Professionals**:
– The launch of Pixtral 12B represents a significant step forward in the capabilities of vision LLMs, opening up new avenues for applications in AI, cloud infrastructure, and security-related tasks where image and text interaction is critical.
– Professionals in data security and compliance should be aware of the model’s capabilities, especially considering potential implications for data handling in sensitive environments.
By providing advanced functionalities to handle multimodal data, Pixtral 12B can transform workflows in various sectors, emphasizing the need for robust security measures while leveraging such powerful tools.