Mistral AI takes on ChatGPT with lightning-fast 'le Chat'

French startup Mistral AI unveiled 'le Chat,' a comprehensive AI assistant to enhance personal and professional productivity. Le Chat offers features like project tracking, document summarization, and real-time information sourcing. The release follows up on a heated AI race at the beginning of 2025, which saw the escalation of the Chinese AI model DeepSeek. Now, the French company is offering another option to the AI landscape.

Founded in April 2023 by former Google DeepMind and Meta AI experts Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, Mistral AI has quickly established itself as a powerhouse in the European and global AI landscape. By June 2024, it had become Europe's most significant AI startup outside the San Francisco Bay Area. The company's journey exemplifies the rapid evolution of AI technology, with a strong commitment to open, portable, and customizable solutions.

Mistral’s Le Chat features

One of the capabilities introduced by le Chat is 'Flash Answers,' which processes information at an impressive speed of approximately 1,000 words per second. According to the French company, this is faster than any other chat assistant. In a video comparison shown by Mistral AI, the model outperformed both ChatGPT and Anthropic’s AI model Claude.

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. Users can access these features through both iOS and Android applications, making advanced AI assistance readily available on mobile devices.

One of le Chat's standout features is its robust multilingual capability. The platform's Mistral Large model demonstrates fluency in five languages: French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. This multilingual foundation sets it apart from competitors, as the model was specifically designed with multilingualism as a core feature rather than an afterthought. According to early user feedback, the platform has shown particular strength in specialized areas, with impressive performance in medical terminology.

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Le Chat’s pricing

Mistral AI has adopted a tiered pricing approach to make le Chat accessible to various user segments. While many features are available in the free tier, the Pro version is priced at $14.99 monthly. The platform offers special considerations for students, with over 50% discount on Pro subscriptions. For enterprise users, le Chat Enterprise provides secure deployments and custom models, currently available in private preview.

The rise of Mistral in the AI landscape

That Mistral AI would have been a serious contender in the AI landscape became clear from its early days, having raised €105 million two months after its founding. The company has quickly escalated to become a major player in the AI field, getting funding from Microsoft and securing key collaborations with NVIDIA.

At the moment, the French company is reported to be valued at €5.8 billion. Its growth, and the one of the French AI ecosystem, has been one of the priorities of French President Emmanuel Macron, who launched a strategy to create AI champions in 2023–right after Mistral AI was born.

"The French and the whole world are realizing that European players count and that they provide cutting-edge technology. There is a cultural dimension to AI, and I think everyone is starting to realize this. It's also about having European champions, and that's why we created Mistral," Mistral AI CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch told Reuters.

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