ChatGPT competitor Le Chat surpasses 1 million downloads

ChatGPT competitor Le Chat, a conversational AI tool developed by the French startup Mistral AI, topped 1 million downloads two weeks after its launch. In France, the app quickly reached the top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store. The AI model, hailed by French President Emanuel Macron during the recent AI Action Summit, has proven impressive speed and robust multilingual capabilities.

“Le Chat will keep improving and addressing every day’s needs. We look forward to unveiling new features soon,” told Le Parisien Mistral AI CEO Artur Mensch. Mistral AI has emerged as a contender in the AI landscape since its founding in April 2023 by former Google DeepMind and Meta AI experts. The French startup grew fast, raising a €105 million funding round just two months after launch. Mistral AI has secured partnerships with tech giants Microsoft and NVIDIA along the way.

According to TechCrunch, Chinese DeepSeek reached 1 million downloads between January 10 and January 31 and attracted millions more users in the following days. However impressive, ChatGPT reached this milestone just three days after its launch in October 2022.

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How Le Chat takes on ChatGPT

Le Chat's most notable technical achievement is its 'Flash Answers' feature, which processes information at an impressive speed of 1,000 words per second. This makes it faster than Open AI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s AI model Claude.

AI expert Maarten Sukel previously told IO+ how impressed he was by the speed of Le Chat. “I 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 significant advantage here.

Features and multilingual capabilities

Mistral AI’s model boasts a comprehensive set of features, including project tracking, document summarization, and real-time information sourcing. The platform integrates advanced document processing with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, sophisticated code interpretation features, and state-of-the-art image generation powered by Black Forest Labs Flux Ultra.

The AI assistant particularly excels in its multilingual capabilities, offering fluent support in French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. This multilingual basis distinguishes it from competitors since the model was purposefully created with multilingualism as a primary feature rather than an afterthought. User feedback indicates that the platform excels in specific areas, particularly medical terminology.

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Mistral AI: a rising contender

Le Chat’s launch comes at a crucial time for the European AI sector, with recent statistics showing that 12.2 million French people were using conversational AI tools as of December 2024, a threefold increase from the previous year]. The platform's rapid success is particularly noteworthy when compared to ChatGPT's performance, which had established a strong lead with 10.9 million monthly unique visitors in France.

Currently valued at €5.8 billion, Mistral AI has positioned itself as OpenAI’s ChatGPT competitor, following a commitment to open-source models that promote research advancement. DeepSeek, the Chinese contender in this AI race, has also benefitted from open-source development.

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