Mistral Large 2 is a general-purpose language model trained to handle complex reasoning, code generation, and multilingual work at the scale enterprises need. It's free to use via API or self-host, sits in the same performance tier as proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and can ingest documents up to 128,000 tokens long. The core trade-off: it has a knowledge cutoff earlier than competitors and lacks serious vision capabilities, making it less suitable for tasks requiring current events or image understanding. For teams optimizing on cost and reasoning quality rather than breadth of modalities, it's a genuine alternative to paid tiers.