Le Chat Mistral Launches as Free Chatbot to Compete With OpenAI

With Mistral’s newly launched Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot Le Chat Mistral, it may gradually become a herculean task for people to choose from the large array of AI models out there.

Le Chat Mistral and Partnership With Microsoft

Ten months old French startup Mistral recently partnered with technology company Microsoft, a move that was partly targeted at competition with the top players in AI like Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Anthropic. The partnership gave Mistral AI access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as it also provides its model on the service. 

Primarily, the collaboration is designed to conduct research, focusing on customer-specific models for European clients. 

In the wake of this strategic partnership, Mistral debuted a Large Language Model (LLM) that closely resembles OpenAI. It basically has a simple question-and-answer interface that understands and can translate three different languages. This is due to the presence of three different LLMs, that is, data repositories that allow chatbots to provide answers in a conversational manner. 

Mistral Large is one of the LLMs and the firm confirmed that it is the best of the three. The company has reasons to believe that Mistral Large is second only to ChatGPT’s latest version GPT-4, particularly in terms of its reasoning capacity. 

According to Mistral, this chatbot goes as far as understanding questions that contain up to 20,000 words in English. This capacity is around four times smaller than that of GPT-4 Turbo but it is worth acknowledging that Le Chat Mistral is entirely free. This sharply contrasts to OpenAI’s GPT-4 which costs up to $20 a month.

Growing AI Competition

The design similarities of the AI chatbot with ChatGPT are not entirely surprising as Mistral has been seeking a different approach to challenge OpenAI. First, the Arthur Mensch-led startup came up with releasing its Mistral Small model as open-source. With time, it introduced more models that had quite close licensing systems similar to OpenAI. 

However, Mistral’s Le Chat is not the only AI tool that has threatened the existence of OpenAI’s products in recent times. Google launched a video game-generating AI a few days ago dubbed Genie. 

As labeled, Genie is capable of creating playable virtual worlds from a single image and it generally underscores how large tech firms are riding the AI embrace to push more products to users.