Mistral AI’s new coding assistant takes direct aim at GitHub Copilot

Mistral AI unveiled a comprehensive enterprise coding assistant Wednesday, marking the French artificial intelligence company’s most aggressive push yet into the corporate software development market dominated by Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and other Silicon Valley rivals.

The new product, called Mistral Code, bundles the company’s latest AI models with integrated development environment plugins and on-premise deployment options specifically designed for large enterprises with strict security requirements. The launch directly challenges existing coding assistants by offering what the company says is unprecedented customization and data sovereignty.

“Our most significant features are that we propose more customization and to serve our models on premise,” said Baptiste Rozière, a research scientist at Mistral AI and former Meta researcher who helped develop the original Llama language model, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “For customization, we can specialize our models for the customer’s codebase, which can make a huge difference in ...