AI expert on Le Chat: 'Impressed by speed'
After China's DeepSeek, now comes Mistral AI with Le Chat. We talked about it with an AI expert.
Published on February 12, 2025
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We're in a race: after China's DeepSeek, now Mistral AI has released Le Chat, which processes 1000 words per second. Will it replace ChatGPT? We spoke with AI expert Maarten Sukel, who earned his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of the book The AI Revolution and founder of the company The AI Factory.
Last week, 'Le Chat' was unveiled: an extensive AI assistant from France. Le Chat offers functions such as summarizing documents and searching for information in real-time. The release follows the Chinese AI model DeepSeek. With this, the French company offers a European option in the AI landscape.
AI expert Sukel is positive. “I have already tried Mistral AI and am impressed by the speed and quality of the technical link. It's great to see that there is now a powerful European counterpart to ChatGPT and DeepSeek.” Sukel is currently working on Beleidsradar.nl, which offers users the ability to search through more than 600,000 policy documents. The speed of Mistral may be a major advantage here. Sukel is considering implementing Le Chat. “With Le Chat, we can efficiently process large amounts of data. I still have to look into whether it is cost-effective.
The advantages of Le Chat at a glance
Several advantages at a glance: Le Chat introduces 'Flash Answers', which processes information at a speed of 1000 words per second, faster than other chat assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. The platform also offers optical character recognition (OCR), code interpretation, and image generation via Black Forest Labs Flux Ultra. Le Chat stands out for its robust multilingualism, with fluent support for five languages: French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. The model excels especially in specialized domains, such as medical terminology.
Europe as frontrunner
The language model comes at just the right time. Europe is not currently leading the AI race. However, important developments are currently taking place on European soil to achieve that. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented an initiative during the AI summit in Paris. This ambitious plan aims to mobilize 200 billion euros in investments in AI. The EU's new investment will support the development of four AI gigafactories, among other things.
Sukel concludes: “With our rich history of entrepreneurship and technological innovation, we are well positioned to play an important role in the global market. Investments must be not only made in, for instance, data centers, but also in actual implementations that make a real difference for Europeans.”
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