Pixtral Large

Pixtral Large, released on 18 November 2024, was the moment Mistral put a frontier-scale multimodal model into the open-weights world. It was built as a 124-billion-parameter system: the Mistral Large 2 text decoder with a 1-billion-parameter vision encoder bolted on top, so the model read images without giving up the language ability of the flagship it was based on. Its strength was documents rather than photographs. In Mistral's own comparison the model leads on MathVista (69.4), DocVQA (93.3), VQAv2 (80.9) and the MM-MT-Bench instruction test (7.4, against 7.3 for Claude 3.5 Sonnet). The wins are narrower than the launch text suggests. The ChartQA claim names only GPT-4o (85.2) and Gemini 1.5 Pro (83.8), while Claude 3.5 Sonnet scores 89.1 there against Pixtral's 88.1; MMMU 64.0 is the lowest of the four models compared, behind GPT-4o (68.6), Claude (68.4) and Gemini (66.3); and AI2D 93.8 sits behind Gemini 1.5 Pro (94.6). The table also carries two rows for each rival — Mistral's own measurement and the number that rival published — and Mistral's is consistently the lower one. Read against the published figures, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is ahead on MathVista (70.7), ChartQA (90.8), DocVQA (94.2) and AI2D (95.3). Mistral printed one more chart next to its own: the LMSYS Vision Arena ranking, where Pixtral-Large-2411 sits tenth with 1,159 points, below GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro — the three models the table above it beats. The 128,000-token context window was specified as holding at least thirty high-resolution images at once, which made whole-document work practical rather than page-by-page. The licensing was the split Mistral used throughout this period: weights on Hugging Face under the Mistral Research License for research and education, and a separate Mistral Commercial License for anything commercial — open to inspect and study, not free to sell on. Mistral deprecated the model on 27 February 2026 and switched it off on 31 May 2026, pointing users to Mistral Medium 3.5. The capability did not disappear so much as get absorbed: vision stopped being a separate model at Mistral and became a property of the mainline ones.

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