Le Chat by Mistral AI announces major updates as ChatGPT-4o and other generative AI tools face serious competition. The company’s free AI work assistant not only helps users with creative tasks, coding, and research, but it has also expanded new features in beta.
After integrating advanced AI capabilities and its recent funding rounds, the parent company of Le Chat is valued at $6 billion from the previous $2 billion last year.
Le Chat features pose serious market competition
Generative AI launches and innovation continue to be the theme in Q4 2024 but access to advanced tools is often paid. However, Mistral AI, the French company behind generative AI work assistant, Le Chat, has announced new features.
According to the company press release, Le Chat will allow access to real-time information for research with sourced references. Another feature is the addition of a Canvas interface. The tool could allow for creating and editing content directly within Le Chat, including documents, presentations, and code.
Users could also process PDFs, graphs, tables, and complex data with the new Pixtral Large model. The feature also allows generation of high-quality images using models from Black Forest Labs. Among all these features, the real tool that could give competitors a run for their money is free access.
Le Chat has marketed itself as an all-in-one platform, integrating AI models.
Le Chat is powered by Pixtral Large, which is a 124B multimodal model. According to the company’s comparison, among other AL tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, Le Chat offers free access to the latest frontier models. ChatGPT and Claude require payment for some of these features, while Perplexity reportedly lacks functionalities like image generation, ideation tools, and task agents.
Users on X give Le Chat a thumbs up
Currently, all features are free during the beta stage as the company says it is “working towards premium tiers with higher service guarantees.”
Rowan Cheung, the founder of The Rundown AI believes that the new features are a major improvement in the last 6 months. Cheung says Chat excels at math reasoning, real-world tasks, and chart and document understanding. The entrepreneur also explains that the AI tool supports analyzing up to 30 high-resolution images with its massive 128k context window.
The LeChat (Chatbot) by @MistralAI now has access to:
– Canvas
– Web Search
– Image generationI don't know what's behind the image generation, but pas mal! 👏 pic.twitter.com/Y8e1VppqQC
— Maziyar PANAHI (@MaziyarPanahi) November 18, 2024
Most users on X(fomerly Twitter) seem impressed with the free access to these advanced features, at least for now.
One year ago, Mistral AI was reportedly valued at $2 billion. It has now turned to $6 billion in 2024 after its latest funding of $643 million. According to a report by the Financial Times, AI start-ups are generating revenue faster if compared to previous tech waves like SaaS companies. According to Stripe’s data cited by the paper, top AI companies hit $1 million in annual revenue within 11 months as SaaS companies took 15 months. They also reportedly scaled to $30 million five times quicker.
Capgemini also announced a global AI expansion in partnership with Mistral AI and Microsoft on Wednesday.
This is just one of the many companies that are accelerating the adoption of generative AI (Gen AI) technologies. Mistral AI’s advanced language models will be integrated into Microsoft Azure AI Studio and leveraged alongside Capgemini’s generative AI background. The plan is reportedly to create scalable, cost-efficient, and secure solutions globally.
As per CRN, with partnerships from tech giants like SAP, IBM, and Nvidia, Mistral AI is focusing on building state-of-the-art AI tools and APIs.
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