On Thursday, Mistral AI, a NVIDIA Corp.-backed, French-based startup, became the latest entrant in an increasingly crowded and active race for the trillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) market.
Europe’s so-called response to OpenAI, debuted a new version of its open-source AI assistant, Le Chat, that it says lets enterprises and consumers access news, upload documents, and track projects at faster speeds. Previously available on a web browser, Le Chat is free via app stores for the first time. A Pro tier option is $14.99 a month.
“The French and the whole world are realizing that European players count and that they provide cutting-edge technology,” Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch told Reuters. “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.”
The 2-year-old company has touted itself as an European alternative to Chinese and American offerings, with the ultimate goal of making AI more open and accessible to everyone. To that end, Mistral officials said they have signed partnerships with several dozen large companies, including Veolia, a French water and waste management group, and are in discussion with more.
Mistral has also raised more than $1 billion from investors that include NVIDIA, as well as investment firms Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed.
But the nearly 2-year-old company has fallen under the radar when compared to marquee competitors like OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has 200 million weekly active users, and DeepSeek, the fledgling Chinese AI startup that burst upon the scene late January and has since rocketed to the top of free apps downloaded on Apple Inc. and Google’s app stores.
Mensch has said Le Chat has “several million subscribers.” To gain more foothold, Mistral claims the latest version of Le Chat is faster for certain tasks than its competitors’ platforms in what has become a common refrain among AI developers.
On Thursday, Moveworks announced Quick GPT, its latest agentic AI assistant for human workforces to automate tasks and find answers when questioning the company data repository. A day earlier, Google introduced Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, which it boasts “has the strongest coding performance and ability to handle complex prompts, with better understanding and reasoning of world knowledge than any model we’ve released so far.”
