Mistral AI, the French gem of artificial intelligence, has just announced a series of major improvements for its conversational assistant Le Chat. This significant update allows the company to position itself as a serious competitor against American giants like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Claude from Anthropic. We often forget it, but Mistral is undoubtedly the only European company capable of competing with the big names in generative AI.
Premium features now available for free
The main new feature is the integration of real-time web search. Like SearchGPT, Le Chat can now search the internet to provide up-to-date answers beyond its training data. An important point: the AI systematically cites its sources and allows easy access to them, like Perplexity.
The other major addition is Canvas, a collaborative creation space for interacting with Mistral’s AI models. This double-windowed interface makes it easy to create content, whether documents, presentations or models. A feature reminiscent of ChatGPT Canvases, but offered here for free in beta version.
Thanks to a partnership with Black Forest Labs, Le Chat also integrates image generation via the Flux Pro model, considered one of the most efficient on the market alongside Midjourney. An Agent system also makes it possible to automate certain recurring tasks with pre-prompts, like OpenAI’s personalized GPTs.
More powerful multimodal AI
Chat also takes a technical leap forward with the integration of Pixtral Large, a new multimodal model with 124 billion parameters. Capable of processing up to 128,000 tokens and 30 high-resolution images simultaneously, it allows you to analyze complex documents such as PDFs, graphs or tables.
The French startup also focuses on performance, with a new speculative editing method that significantly speeds up query processing. An approach that is intended to be pragmatic, as underlined by the company which claims not to be “obsessed with general artificial intelligence at all costs” – a barely veiled dig at OpenAI.
If you’ve never used Mistral, the LLM is clearly worth a look. Essentially free, French and efficient, it has nothing to be ashamed of compared to the big names in the sector. Mistral AI is easily accessible after creating an account on cat.mistral.ai.
