Buy European

Not being american does not mean that this "AI" is better or worse than all of the other questionable "AI" out there.

What’s great about Mistral is that they have to follow the EU AI act.

So a goodenough AI that's marginally behind in coding and equivalent or better elsewhere (especially in other languages) is only good because it's European? They spent a minimal fraction of what the yanks did and made an equally good AI that is better in some corporate use cases apart from vibe coding. Also, it's more reliable than gpt5 when it comes to real world questions. I see it as a good thing, especially because so far, they are not trying to delete jobs in other industries to try to make back trillions in burned money...

A bit short sighted to say their goals didn’t work out.

Look at what they’ve built: STT and TTS pipelines, multilingual models, document retrieval, parsing, and summarization.

Those are enterprise and government use cases, which makes sense for a European sovereign AI initiative aimed at governments.

They do also have le chat, which is like ChatGPT. devstral is currently quite behind, but also not reinforcement learned on benchmarks to shit like Qwen/GLM models are.

Mistral still sit in a good spot of small/hostable, private, and good world knowledge plus communication.

On the frontier level they’re probably 8-12 months behind, though devstral was the first local agent I could run.

Yes, the models are open, the API's are European, and the outomes are good enough. My money is better spent on Mistral than on the American ones; they can have their bleeding-edge closed stuff.

What's really important IMO is if uses stolen data/will it steal mine, and if it will burn a box of seal puppies to basically do a Google search.

While it may not compare to the closed, corporate "frontier" models that are running each query on racks upon racks of servers worth millions of dollars in a corporate data center, it's not clear to me that's a reasonable comparison. Mistral is actually one of my personal favorite models and it has nothing to do with being French (although that is a huge bonus, it doesn't really contribute to my method of scoring and ranking of different models). It's simply more reliable and consistent than a lot of the other open-weight models, it follows directions well and has good task comprehension. Even with abliteration (guardrail removal) it doesn't generally have weird artifacts and it uses diverse, clear and reasonable language in its responses. It also handles Markdown really nicely in a very consistent way without needing guidance. To me, these are more important properties than simply "containing the most recent training data" or how many agents it has. At the end of the day I'm going to judge a model based on its output more than how it gets there and it turns out you don't need all the latest whiz-bang features to get acceptable output depending on what exactly you're doing with it.

It may not be as technically impressive as even the latest greatest open-weight models like Qwen, but it's still a great model whether it's French or not, and I would still use it just as often as I already do even if it were Chinese or North Korean or Russian I don't care, all that matters is that it's open-weight, runs with reasonable hardware requirements, is flexible in how it can be used, and produces good output. Mistral ticks all the boxes.

Le Chat is the LLM I use (if I actually want to use AI). It does the job.

I haven't checked the competition to be honest. Mistral is good enough for my needs.
Are others that much better?

They are better than copilot but worse than gemini and chatgpt.

The app closes everytime I open it and says some google srvices error. It doesnt work if you get it without the playstore.

I really want it to succeed but it needs to keep going.

The name alone takes the cake "le chat"