Codestral 22B vs Grok 2

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

Grok 2

xAI

Grok 2, released by xAI in August 2024, is a large language model with 131K token context window and native image understanding, developed with access to real-time information from the X platform. It features multimodal input capabilities and improved reasoning over its predecessor. Grok 2 targets conversational assistants, image analysis, and real-time information retrieval tasks via the xAI API.