Mistral AI Unveils Major Updates to Le Chat, Challenging ChatGPT with New Features and Models

Mistral AI's New Chatbot Rivals GPT, But For Free - Decrypt

Mistral AI, the French AI company founded by ex-Google and Meta employees, just overhauled its free, multimodal AI platform -- and it comes close to matching, and sometimes even exceeding, paid offerings from OpenAI or Anthropic. The suite of AI tools from the Paris-based startup now features web search and image generation capabilities alongside a new visual model that outperforms larger rivals on key benchmarks. The company has pushed an update to analyze documents, an updated Large Language Model, and Codestral, an LLM focused on coding tasks. But the icing on the cake is its use of Flux Pro to generate images, meaning it's the multimodal chatbot with the best image-generation capabilities currently available. A new Canvas interface enables direct content editing, positioning Le Chat -- Mistral's name of choice for its chatbot UI -- as an enterprise-ready workspace tool. "We're not chasing AGI at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands," Mistral said in a statement, distancing itself from competitors' broader artificial general intelligence ambitions that have sparked concerns among experts. The company was valued at $2 billion in its December funding round. The Pixtral Large, a 124-billion-parameter visual model, outperformed GPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro with 69.4% accuracy on MathVista and 93.3% on DocVQA. It handles up to 30 high-resolution images within a 128,000-token context window. Flux Pro, meanwhile, outperforms all other image generators in terms of quality and inference speeds, as previously reported by Decrypt. ChatGPT uses DALL-E, which is primitive by comparison. So Flux's integration into Le Chat is a welcome move. Those features have been introduced as "free beta offerings," giving users access to the latest generative AI tools at no cost. Mistral did not say when it intended to start charging for its tools. We put both free versions of Mistral's and ChatGPT's chatbots to the test. There were a lot of similarities -- mostly in terms of writing style -- but the differences were enough to draw out some distinctions between the two. ChatGPT's GPT-4o remains the crown jewel of language models, displaying unmatched nuance in complex reasoning, creative writing, and technical analysis. Its ability to understand context and maintain coherent, long-form conversations has defined the industry standard. During extensive testing, GPT-4o has shown remarkable capability in tasks ranging from literary analysis to advanced coding challenges. Le Chat's Mistral Large 2.5, while impressive, operates a tier below GPT-4o in sophisticated reasoning tasks. However, it excels in practical applications, offering snappy responses and robust daily task performance. While the model possesses multilingual capabilities, it tends to be less creative than GPT-4o. Web Search Integration Le Chat offers a free web search feature-users can access current information with direct citation links, similar to how you'd use a traditional search engine but with AI-powered synthesis. The integration feels natural and unobtrusive, making fact-checking and research workflows notably efficient. The free access to this feature represents a significant value proposition. ChatGPT's SearchGPT, while more sophisticated in its approach, sits behind a paywall. It takes a unique angle on web integration, often providing more contextual analysis (to the point of even hallucinating some responses). The Chrome plugin offers deeper integration with OpenAI's language model capabilities, though many users might find Le Chat's straightforward approach more practical for daily use. Image Generation Capabilities Le Chat's integration of Flux Pro is a major advantage in the image generation space. The system produces very detailed visuals with great adherence to prompts, particularly excelling in artistic styles, accurate human anatomy, and complex scene composition. Recent benchmarks place Flux Pro at the forefront of image generation technology, with notably better performance in areas like texture detail and spatial coherence. ChatGPT's DALL-E 3, while groundbreaking at launch, now shows its age against newer models. Though capable of producing serviceable images, it often struggles with complex prompts, detailed textures, and consistent style maintenance - areas where Flux Pro demonstrates clear superiority. The gap is particularly noticeable in professional-grade image generation tasks. Custom AI Agents Le Chat's democratic approach to AI agents represents a significant shift in accessibility. Users can create, customize, and deploy specialized agents for tasks ranging from data analysis to creative writing for free. ChatGPT, on the other hand, maintains a two-tier system. While free users can access pre-made GPTs, the ability to create custom ones remains a premium feature. The quality of these GPTs is excellent, and the ability to configure them via natural language prompting is a plus; but the restriction on creation tools and the pricing wall limits the potential for personalized workflow optimization. Vision Analysis Capabilities This one seems to be a tie -- at least in our first quick tests. GPT-4V and Pixtral Large demonstrate remarkably similar capabilities in real-world applications. Both excel at diagram interpretation, image understanding, math notation, and spatial awareness. While benchmark numbers show slight variations for the LLMs, Vision Models, and Image Generation models, the practical difference in day-to-day use cases is not that significant. Both systems handle everything from creative writing to technical diagrams with impressive accuracy, making the choice between them more about ecosystem preference than capability differences. The choice between these platforms increasingly depends on specific use cases The financial implications are the make-or-break deal: Le Chat offers approximately 80-90% of ChatGPT Plus's functionality at no cost, making it an increasingly attractive option for both individual users and small businesses operating under budget constraints.

New updates give Mistral AI's Le Chat an edge over ChatGPT - SiliconANGLE

French generative artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI is taking the fight to OpenAI with a host of updates announced today. The company announced new chatbot capabilities that surpass those of ChatGPT, and a couple of powerful large language models, including the all-new Pixtral Large and an updated version of Mistral Large. Mistral's Le Chat, which means "the cat" in French, is getting around half a dozen new features that transform it into more of a work assistant, pitting it against rivals like ChatGPT and Anthropic PBC's Claude. For instance, Le Chat can now search the web and provide responses with citations, similar to ChatGPT and the generative AI search engine Perplexity. It also gains a new "Canvas" tool that's similar to ChatGPT's Canvas, where users can edit, modify and otherwise transform content such as web pages, data visualizations and PowerPoint presentations via text-and voice-based commands. "You can use [the canvas feature] to create documents, presentations, code, mockups... the list goes on," the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new features. "You're able to modify its contents in place without regenerating responses, version your drafts, and preview your designs." Moreover, Le Chat also gains the ability to ingest and process larger PDF documents, large images, graphs and equations, in order to analyze them for insights and summarize their contents. The company said Le Chat is also getting better image generating capabilities as it now integrates Black Forest Labs Inc.'s Flux Pro model for that purpose. Even better, Mistral said it can now support automated workflows for tasks like invoice processing and expense reporting. This means that Le Chat now supports "agentic AI", enabling it to perform complex, multistep tasks on behalf of users, which is something ChatGPT currently does not offer, although it is on the horizon. Most of the new capabilities announced today will be free to access for the time being, at least while they're still in beta. As for the new LLMs, the most exciting one is Pixtral Large, which is a multimodal model that can process both text and images. Pixtral Large is the second addition to the Pixtral family of models, following on from the debut of the original Pixtral 12B that launched in September. According to the company, it's a lot more capable, weighing in at a hefty 124 billion parameters, besting many of the most powerful multimodal models of its rivals, such as Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google LLC's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o on a number of key benchmarks. Parameters are important as they roughly measure an LLM's problem-solving abilities, with more parameters equating to better performance. "Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images," the company said in a blog post announcing it. "The model demonstrates frontier-level image understanding." According to Mistral's head of developer relations, Sophia Yang, Pixtral Large is said to excel in terms of "multilingual optical character recognition, reasoning, chart understanding and more". To prove this, Yang posted a screenshot of Pixtral Large in Le Chat analyzing a shared bill from a restaurant using OCR, in order to fairly split the cost. It identifies the items purchased by the user and tells them exactly how much they owe, including their share of the tip. Mistral said Pixtral Large has a context window of 128,000 tokens, which means it can handle up to 30 high-resolution images at once, or a 300-page book, which is similar to the capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4o. It's available to download now on Hugging Face. In addition to Pixtral Large, the company unveiled a newly updated Mistral Large model. Mistral Large is the company's flagship text-understanding model, and the new version, Mistral Large 24.11, comes with improvements in long context understanding, making its better for tasks such as document analysis, the company said. Mistral is one of a host of promising AI startups looking to take on perceived generative AI leaders OpenAI and Google. It was founded in April 2023 by a team of former Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. employees, and is said to be valued at $6 billion after securing a number of multi-million dollar funding rounds. To date, it has released around a dozen AI models, including some for commercial use and some for research purposes. Its best known models, Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mixtral 8x22B, are all said to be open-source and available for download via the Hugging Face platform, while the Mistral Small, Medium and Large can only be accessed via the company's application programming interface via a license.

Mistral's open-source alternative to ChatGPT just got serious | Digital Trends

French AI startup Mistral announced Monday that it is incorporating a half-dozen new features and capabilities into its free generative AI work assistant, dubbed le Chat (French for "the cat"), that will put the open-source chatbot on par with leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Le Chat can now search the web and provide cited sources, similar to what Perplexity and SearchGPT both offer. Mistral's chatbot now also offers a Canvas feature akin to Claude's Artifacts where users can modify and edit content and code. What's more, le Chat can now generate images thanks to an integration with Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro, the same image generator that powers Grok-2's capabilities. Canvas Beyond that, le Chat can now analyze and summarize the contents of large PDF files, including any graphs and equations. The company is even rolling out AI "agents," beating OpenAI to the punch, which can automate workflows for repetitive tasks and be shared among a company's employees. Recommended Videos Many of these features are only made possible by Mistral's new model, the 128B-parameter Pixtral Large. Built atop Mistral Large 2, this frontier model offers a 128k prompt window and state-of-the-art performance on a number of industry benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2. "Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images," the company wrote in its announcement post. Mistral is also debuting a new version of its flagship Mistral Large model. Version 24.11 reportedly offers improved performance in tasks that require larger amounts of context, such as document analysis. "At Mistral, our approach to AI is different -- we're not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities," the company wrote. "This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at affordable price points." As such, all of the features debuting today are currently free to use for all le Chat users. Mistral was founded in April 2023 by former Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind employees. The company is currently valued at $2 billion and offers nearly a dozen different AI models for commercial and research use. Three of the models -- Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B -- are open source and available to the public through Hugging Face. The Mistral Small, Medium, and Large models, conversely, are closed-source and only available through the Mistral API. Users can access both Large 24.11 and Pixtral Large with either a commercial use license or a more restrictive research license from Mistral.

Mistral unleashes Pixtral Large and upgrades Le Chat into full-on ChatGPT competitor

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Mistral, the French startup that made waves last year with a record-setting seed funding amount for Europe, has launched a slew of updates today including a new, large foundational model named Pixtral Large. The company is further upgrading its free web-chased chatbot, Le Chat, adding image generation, web search, and an interactive "canvas," matching the features of and turning it into a more serious and direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. As Mistral AI CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch wrote on his account on the social network X, "At Mistral, we've grown aware that to create the best AI experience, one needs to co-design models and product interfaces. Pixtral was trained with high-impact front-end applications in mind and is a good example of that." Users who want to try out the new Le Chat features will need to enable them as beta features on the web interface. Note that Le Chat access does require a free Mistral, Google, or Microsoft account to use. Pixtral Large -- open source multimodal AI Pixtral Large, Mistral's new 124-billion-parameter model, builds upon its predecessor, Mistral Large 2, unveiled over the summer 2024, as well as its first multimodal model, Pixtral 12-B, released in September. It includes a 123-billion-parameter decoder and a 1-billion-parameter vision encoder, enabling it to excel in both text and visual data processing. Parameters, as you'll recall, refer to the number of settings that govern a model's inputs and outputs, with more parameters generally connoting a more capable, knowledgable and performant model. According to a post by Mistral Head of Developer Relations Sophia Yang to her X account, Pixtral Large excels at "multilingual OCR [optical character recognition], reasoning, chart understanding, and more." Yang included a screenshot of Pixtral Large in Le Chat analyzing a receipt uploaded by a user using OCR, showing its capabilities for ingesting and documenting expenses, as well as in this case, splitting a bill with a tip included. With a context window of 128,000 tokens, Pixtral Large is able to handle up to 30 high-resolution images per input or around a 300-page book, again equivalent to leading OpenAI GPT series models. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2, making it ideal for tasks like chart interpretation, document analysis, and image understanding. While the model and weights are available for download freely on Hugging Face, they are released under a custom Mistral AI Research License, which specifies only non-commercial, research-focused applications. Those looking to use it commercially will need to do so through Mistral's API on its Le Platforme managed web service, or obtain a separate license from the company directly through a contact form, meaning it is not actually fully open source. Still, by offering Pixtral Large, Mistral AI empowers researchers and developers to harness advanced multimodal AI while ensuring responsible and ethical use. Le Chat comes for ChatGPT with rival matching features At the center of Mistral's AI tools is Le Chat, a free platform now enhanced with new features powered by Pixtral Large. Designed for diverse use cases like research, ideation, and automation, Le Chat integrates text, vision, and interactive functionalities into a seamless productivity experience. New Features of Le Chat: 1. Web Search with Citations: Users can supplement the AI's knowledge with real-time web searches, complete with source citations for transparency. 2. Canvas for Ideation: This innovative interface allows users to create, modify, and collaborate on documents, presentations, and designs in an interactive new space that appears to the left of the chatbot interface. As Yang wrote about it on X: Le Chat Canvas is "great for creative ideation. You can use Canvas to create documents, presentations, code, mockups... the list goes on." It comes just six weeks after OpenAI released its own Canvas sidebar interactive element for ChatGPT, which many viewed as a feature designed to rival Anthropic's earlier Artifacts release for its Claude chatbot. 3. Advanced Document and Image Analysis: With Pixtral Large, Le Chat can now process and summarize complex PDFs, extracting insights from graphs, tables, equations, and more. 4. Image Generation: Through a partnership with separate image model startup Black Forest Labs, Le Chat now includes image generation capabilities powered by the Flux Pro model, enabling users to produce high-quality visuals directly in the chat interface. This is a clear answer to OpenAI's DALL-E 3 integration in ChatGPT (both models from OpenAI, however) as well as the second big integration of Black Forest Labs' new models into a leading AI foundation model provider's offerings, following its earlier team-up with Elon Musk's xAI to power image generation in that company's Grok-2 chatbot available through X, the social network Musk also owns. 5. Task Agents for Automation: Customizable agents automate repetitive tasks like summarizing meeting minutes, processing invoices, or scanning receipts, saving users time and effort. These features position Le Chat as a versatile AI assistant, capable of handling tasks traditionally requiring multiple tools. Mistral AI highlights Le Chat's comprehensive feature set and its accessibility compared to platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. While competitors may require premium subscriptions for similar functionalities, Le Chat provides an integrated, multimodal experience entirely for free during its beta phase. Mistral is coming to play hard With Pixtral Large and the enhanced Le Chat, Mistral is flexing its research and development muscles. Even as some in the tech industry believe that the cost of intelligence is being driven down and making life more difficult for model providers to find revenue streams, Mistral isn't giving up on advancing its offerings to compete with the other leaders in the field, and doing so on fewer parameters -- 124 billion compared to say, 405 billion from Meta's latest Llama 3.1 release. However, Mistral is still missing some of the advanced voice and audio features found on rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode or Google's Gemini Live. A recent survey by Kong showed despite its technical prowess and varying open-source and proprietary offerings, usage of Mistral's models and API by large enterprises remain far behind those of U.S.-based companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft. Yet with the recent presidential election and influence of xAI founder Elon Musk on President Trump, it is likely that the EU and those within it will look to Mistral as a means of accessing AI outside the control of the U.S. and its new, controversial leader. Put another way: AI is rapidly becoming tied to nationalism and geopolitics, and Mistral finds itself in the perhaps advantageous position of being one of the best AI model providers Europe has yet cultivated.

Mistral unveils new AI models and chat features

French AI startup Mistral has released a slew of updates to its product portfolio as it looks to remain competitive in the cutthroat AI space. Mistral's Le Chat chatbot platform can now search the web -- with citations in line, a la OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's also gained a "canvas" tool along the lines of ChatGPT Canvas, allowing users to modify, edit, or transform content leveraging Mistral's AI models. "You can use [the canvas feature] to create documents, presentations, code, mockups... the list goes on," Mistral writes in a blog post. "You're able to modify its contents in place without regenerating responses, version your drafts, and preview your designs." Beyond all this, Le Chat can now process large PDF docs and images for analysis and summarization, including docs containing graphs and equations. As of today, the platform incorporates Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro model for image generation. And Le Chat can now host automated workflows for tasks such as scanning for expense reporting and invoice processing; Mistal calls these "agents." Some of the new features in Le Chat are made possible by Mistral's new models. One, Pixtral Large, can process both text and images -- it's the second in Mistral's Pixtral family of models. Weighing in at 124 parameters, Pixtral Large matches or bests leading models including Anthropic's latest Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI's GPT-4o on certain multimodal benchmarks. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model's problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.) "Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images," Mistral wrote in a blog post. "The model demonstrates frontier-level image understanding. Mistral has also unveiled a new version of Mistral Large, its flagship line of text-only models. Called Mistral Large 24.11, the new model brings "notable improvements" in long context understanding, making it well-suited for use cases like document analysis and task automation, Mistral says. Both Pixtral Large and Mistral Large 24.11 are available under two licenses: a more restrictive license for research and academic use and an enterprise license for experimentation, testing, and commercialization. Mistral Large 24.11 will also be available on cloud platforms including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in the coming days, Mistral says. Paris-based Mistral, which recently raised $640 million in venture capital, continues to gradually expand its AI offerings. Over the past few months, the company has launched a free service for developers to test its models, an SDK to let customers fine-tune those models, and new models, including a generative model for code called Codestral. Co-founded by alumni from Meta and DeepMind, Mistral's stated mission is to create highly competitive models and services around those models -- and ideally make money in the process. While the "making money" bit is proving to be challenging (as it is for most generative AI startups), Mistral reportedly began to generate revenue this summer.

Mistral Adds Web Search to Generative AI Work Assistant | PYMNTS.com

"A significant share of le Chat usage comes from students and professionals who use it for learning, research and work," the company said in a Monday (Nov. 18) blog post. "To help better facilitate these use cases, we've augmented le Chat's training knowledge with internet search." This and other new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks, according to the post. Mistral has also added a new interface within le Chat that helps users modify, edit or transform content. The interface, Canvas, can help users create documents, presentation, code, markups and other content, the post said. Other new features added to le Chat and announced Monday include the ability to analyze and summarize large, complex PDF documents and images; the ability to generate high quality images, powered by Black Forest Labs; and the ability to create agents that can automate repetitive workflows like receipt scanning for expense reporting and processing invoices, per the post. These features will be launched as free beta offerings. Mistral is also working toward premium tiers that will have higher service guarantees, according to the post. "If your current AI-productivity toolchain is siloed or expensive, le Chat will give you an alternative to do your best work," the post said. It was reported in June that Mistral raised €600 million (about $640 million) in a Series B funding round that valued it at $6 billion about one year after its seed round. In July, the firm formed a partnership with French banking group BNP Paribas that provides access to the AI firm's current and future commercial AI models across the bank's business lines. The bank is using Mistral's large language models (LLMs) in customer support, sales, IT and other areas. Also in July, Mistral and Nvidia introduced an AI model called Mistral NeMo that is designed to bring advanced AI capabilities to standard desktop computers. NeMo could change how businesses use AI, moving from cloud-based to desktop-native AI, PYMNTS reported at the time.