Mistral, the corporate typically thought-about Europe’s nice hope for AI, is releasing a number of updates to its AI assistant, Le Chat. Along with a significant improve to the net interface, the corporate is releasing a cellular app on iOS and Android.
As a reminder, Mistral develops its personal massive language fashions. The corporate’s flagship fashions, resembling Mistral Giant or its multimodal mannequin Pixtral Giant, can be found for industrial use by way of an API or by way of a cloud accomplice, resembling Azure AI Studio, Amazon Bedrock and Google’s Vertex AI. It additionally releases plenty of open-weight fashions underneath the Apache 2.0 license.
Mistral goals to place itself as a reputable different to OpenAI or Anthropic. Along with creating basis fashions, it presents an AI assistant known as Le Chat that competes straight with ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
That’s why Mistral is lastly releasing a cellular app for Le Chat in order that it might probably higher compete for a coveted spot in your telephone’s residence display. The cellular app options the standard chatbot interface. You may question Mistral’s AI mannequin and ask followup questions in a easy conversation-like interface.
Over the previous couple of months, Le Chat has developed to turn into a reliable AI assistant. In November 2024, Mistral added help for net search with citations. It additionally helps you to generate photos or work together with free-form canvas to edit textual content or code in a separate window.
Extra just lately, the corporate signed a wide-ranging deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to floor outcomes with a dependable supply of data. Nevertheless, there’s no voice mode in Mistral’s cellular app for individuals who rely lots on voice interactions to question AI assistants.
With right this moment’s replace to Le Chat, Mistral can be introducing a Professional tier for $14.99 monthly, or €14.99 monthly in Europe. Whereas the corporate is not detailing the precise AI mannequin it’s utilizing underneath the hood, the corporate says the Professional plan comes with entry to the “highest-performing mannequin,” which means that free accounts don’t have entry to the top-of-the-line mannequin.
Different advantages embody greater limits throughout the board and the power to choose out of sharing your knowledge with Mistral — the corporate is bringing the pay-or-consent mannequin to AI assistants.
As much as 1,000 phrases per second
So what makes Mistral stand out from the competitors? The corporate doesn’t declare that it has higher fashions than the competitors. But it surely asserts that, from a product standpoint, it might probably typically outperform its opponents.
As an illustration, Mistral states that Le Chat runs on “the quickest inference engines on the planet” and it might probably reply as much as 1,000 phrases per second. In our utilization, it felt sooner than utilizing ChatGPT with the 4o mannequin, certainly.
Mistral additionally claims that it generates a lot better photos in comparison with ChatGPT or Grok. The explanation Mistral performs nicely on this entrance is that it depends on one of many main image-generation fashions, Black Forest Labs’ Flux Extremely mannequin.
These are nice-to-have options, however one of many important distinguishing components include Le Chat’s enterprise answer. Mistral helps you to deploy Le Chat in your surroundings with customized fashions and a customized person interface.
For those who work in protection or banking, you could want to have the ability to deploy an AI assistant on premise. And it’s at present not doable with ChatGPT Enterprise or Claude Enterprise. That can assist relating to rising the corporate’s income.
However first, let’s see if Mistral’s cellular app can persuade some AI fans to attempt its chatbot. As of this writing, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Google Gemini maintain the #2, #3, and #6 spots, respectively, among the many most downloaded iPhone apps within the U.S.