French AI startup Mistral has launched Devstral 2, a new generation of its AI model designed for coding. This move is part of the company’s effort to catch up to larger AI labs like Anthropic and other coding-focused large language models. The announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and confirms Mistral’s intent to close the gap with its bigger and better-funded rivals.
The unicorn is also entering the ‘vibe-coding’ race, which has fueled the rise of companies like Cursor and Supabase. To compete, Mistral introduced Mistral Vibe, a new command-line interface aimed at facilitating code automation through natural language. The CLI includes tools for file manipulation, code searching, version control, and command execution.
Mistral AI is betting on the added value of context awareness, which is particularly relevant in business use cases. Similar to its AI assistant, Le Chat, which can remember previous conversations with users, Vibe CLI features persistent history. It can also scan file structures and Git statuses to build context and inform its behavior.
This focus on production-grade workflows explains why Devstral 2 is relatively demanding. It requires at least four H100 GPUs or equivalent for deployment and weighs 123 billion parameters. However, the model is also available in a smaller size called Devstral Small. With 24 billion parameters, it is deployable locally on consumer hardware.
The models differ in their open-source licensing. Devstral 2 ships under a modified MIT license, while Devstral Small uses Apache 2.0. They also differ in pricing. Devstral 2 is currently free to use via the company’s API. After the free period, API pricing will cost $0.40 per million tokens for input and $2.00 for output for Devstral 2. For Devstral Small, pricing will be $0.10 per million tokens for input and $0.30 for output.
Mistral has partnered with agent tools Kilo Code and Cline to release Devstral 2 to users. Mistral Vibe CLI is available as an extension in Zed for use inside the IDE.
Europe’s champion AI lab, Mistral, is currently valued at €11.7 billion, approximately $13.8 billion. This follows a Series C funding round led by Dutch semiconductor company ASML, which invested €1.3 billion, approximately $1.5 billion, in September.