The French start-up Mistral AI has just unveiled Le Chat, its chatbot powered by Mistral Large, which presents itself as one of the best generative AI models on the market. Enough to pose as a serious competitor to ChatGPT!
Artificial intelligence continues to develop at lightning speed! While Google integrated Gemini Pro into its chatbot a few weeks ago (see our article), it is the turn of the French start-up Mistral AI to take center stage. The company is taking advantage of the MWC currently being held in Barcelona to present its competitor to ChatGPT. Called Le Chat, this new conversational bot is based on Mistral Large, which is neither more nor less considered one of the most efficient large language models (LLM) on the market, just behind ChatGPT, but ahead of Claude 2 and Gemini Pro. Mistral may be less than a year old, but it is already at an advanced stage in the development of its technology! It is therefore hardly surprising that the company has signed a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, which always delivers when it comes to AI. You can now try Le Chat for free in its beta version.
Mistral AI Le Chat: a language model worthy of GPT-4
With Le Chat, AI aficionados will not be disoriented. Its operation is similar to that of ChatGPT and its friends, with a stripped-down interface going to the essentials. Simply enter your request in the character field provided for this purpose so that the chatbot displays the response in natural and fluid language. On the left you will find a main panel with the history of previous conversations, as well as access to your profile at the bottom left of the screen. The language model currently supports English, French, Spanish, German as well as Italian. Please note, the tool is still in beta, so it is particularly likely to have bugs or generate the famous “hallucinations” – and this was not lacking during our tests.
Chat is based on several major language models developed by Mistral AI: Mistral Large, Mistral Small and Mistral Next. The first is the one used by default, the second is presented as being “fast and economical”and the last as a “prototype […] designed to be brief and concise. It is possible to alternate between them from the chatbot interface. “Mistral Large achieves excellent results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the second model in the world generally available via an API (after GPT-4)”welcomed the company. “It achieves high-level reasoning abilities and can be used for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, particularly in text comprehension and transformation, as well as code generation”.
Please note, Le Chat, unlike the latest versions of ChatGPT, does not have access to the Web and therefore relies on a body of information which may prove to be outdated on certain subjects. The company did not indicate the expiration date of its latest ones, and the chatbot also refused to give us a specific date. To test the AI, simply go with a web browser to the site cat.mistral.ai and create an account or log in via Google.
Mistral and Microsoft: an ambitious partnership
With such promises, Mistral AI was quick to attract investors. The company has thus tied a multi-year partnership with the giant Microsoft, always looking for promising start-ups to dominate the AI market – we remember its $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Thus, the Mountain View firm will inject money and make its cloud infrastructures available to the French start-up in order to allow it to continue to grow. She therefore enters the capital of the company, taking a minority stake.
“This partnership with Microsoft allows Mistral AI to access Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation Large Language Models (LLM), represents an opportunity for Mistral AI to unlock new business possibilities and expand into global markets”, rejoices Microsoft, which is taking the opportunity to reaffirm its dominance in the generative AI market. Note that Mistral AI is taking the opportunity, in addition to deploying Le Chat to the general public, to launch La Plateforme, a service for creating applications based on its models, for developers.