Mistral, a company with high hopes in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe, has released an update to the web version of its AI assistant Le Chat, as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android. It briefly overtook the American ChatGPT and the Chinese DeepSeek in the App Store.
Mistral, a company with high hopes in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe, has released an update to the web version of its AI assistant Le Chat, as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android. It briefly overtook the American ChatGPT and the Chinese DeepSeek in the App Store.
The recent success of Chinese AI has alarmed the tech industry and shaken financial markets, demonstrating that the technology can be created much more cheaply than the billions of dollars invested by American companies. It has also raised questions about why European companies have been so quiet in the AI field.
France, which is hosting the Artificial Intelligence Summit this week, took the opportunity to showcase the achievements of Mistral and its product Le Chat, which recently received several updates and managed to top the list of productivity apps in the App Store for a while.
Le Chat has good data processing performance, based on Cerebras Inference technology. The platform claims to process up to 1,100 words per second, far ahead of its competitors. In controlled tests, Le Chat completed the encoding task in 1.3 seconds, while established competitors such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o took 19 and 46 seconds, respectively.
The platform architecture is based on two sophisticated AI models: Mistral Large for text operations and Pixtral Large for multimodal tasks. This approach provides comprehensive capabilities, from creative writing and translation to image understanding and document analysis.
Mistral has divided its subscription into several tiers to meet different user needs. The Free tier provides access to basic features, while the Pro tier ($14.99 per month) unlocks unlimited messages, expanded news access, and advanced privacy options. For organizations, the Team tier ($24.99 per seat per month) adds collaboration features and API credits, while the Enterprise tier offers custom deployments and specialized solutions.
Previously, experts expressed concern that the European Union is losing the race in the development of artificial intelligence. The USA has a number of successful companies, both focused solely on AI (OpenAI, Anthropic) and large corporations with AI divisions (Google, Meta, Microsoft). In China, Alibaba, in particular, is working on AI, and recently everyone has been talking about the successes of the company DeepSeek. In contrast, the EU does not have such prominent companies, but this may change.
To this end, the OpenEuroLLM alliance was created in Europe, which was joined by more than 20 leading European research institutes, companies, and high-performance computing centers.
