Simon Willison’s Weblog

Devstral 2. Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier today.

• Devstral 2: SOTA open model for code agents with a fraction of the parameters of its competitors and achieving 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified.
• Up to 7x more cost-efficient than Claude Sonnet at real-world tasks.

Devstral 2 is a 123B model released under a janky license - it's "modified MIT" where the modification is:

You are not authorized to exercise any rights under this license if the global consolidated monthly revenue of your company (or that of your employer) exceeds $20 million (or its equivalent in another currency) for the preceding month. This restriction in (b) applies to the Model and any derivatives, modifications, or combined works based on it, whether provided by Mistral AI or by a third party. [...]

Mistral Small 2 is under a proper Apache 2 license with no weird strings attached. It's a 24B model which is 51.6GB on Hugging Face and should quantize to significantly less.

I tried out the larger model via my llm-mistral plugin like this:

llm install llm-mistral
llm mistral refresh
llm -m mistral/devstral-2512 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

For a ~120B model that one is pretty good!

Here's the same prompt with -m mistral/labs-devstral-small-2512 for the API hosted version of Devstral Small 2:

Again, a decent result given the small parameter size. For comparison, here's what I got for the 24B Mistral Small 3.2 earlier this year.

# 9th December 2025, 11:58 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, mistral, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, janky-licenses

Introducing EmbeddingGemma. Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google:

Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is trained on 100+ languages and is small enough to run on less than 200MB of RAM with quantization.

It's available via sentence-transformers, llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama, LMStudio and more.

As usual for these smaller models there's a Transformers.js demo (via) that runs directly in the browser (in Chrome variants) - Semantic Galaxy loads a ~400MB model and then lets you run embeddings against hundreds of text sentences, map them in a 2D space and run similarity searches to zoom to points within that space.

# 4th September 2025, 10:27 pm / google, ai, embeddings, transformers-js, gemma, janky-licenses

Redis is open source again (via) Salvatore Sanfilippo:

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. [...]

I’ll be honest: I truly wanted the code I wrote for the new Vector Sets data type to be released under an open source license. [...]

So, honestly, while I can’t take credit for the license switch, I hope I contributed a little bit to it, because today I’m happy. I’m happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

I'm absolutely thrilled to hear this. Redis 8.0 is out today under the new license, including a beta release of Vector Sets. I've been watching Salvatore's work on those with fascination, while sad that I probably wouldn't use it often due to the janky license. That concern is now gone. I'm looking forward to putting them through their paces!

See also Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license on the Redis blog. An interesting note from that is that they are also:

Integrating Redis Stack technologies, including JSON, Time Series, probabilistic data types, Redis Query Engine and more into core Redis 8 under AGPL

That's a whole bunch of new things that weren't previously part of Redis core.

I hadn't encountered Redis Query Engine before - it looks like that's a whole set of features that turn Redis into more of an Elasticsearch-style document database complete with full-text, vector search operations and geospatial operations and aggregations. It supports search syntax that looks a bit like this:

FT.SEARCH places "museum @city:(san francisco|oakland) @shape:[CONTAINS $poly]" PARAMS 2 poly 'POLYGON((-122.5 37.7, -122.5 37.8, -122.4 37.8, -122.4 37.7, -122.5 37.7))' DIALECT 3

(Noteworthy that Elasticsearch chose the AGPL too when they switched back from the SSPL to an open source license last year).

# 1st May 2025, 5:19 pm / open-source, redis, salvatore-sanfilippo, vector-search, janky-licenses