Le Chat, French competitor to ChatGPT, opens its doors to all Internet users (a little patience)

AI aficionados have been waiting for it, it is now here. The competitor to ChatGPT launched by the French startup Mistral has just launched publicly on the Web.

We will now have to count on one more player in the great waltz of conversational agents since Le Chat joins ChatGPT, Bard and the other Bing Chat. Nothing to do with any feline that would squat in your computer, no, Le Chat is the French company Mistral’s answer to the ChatGPT steamroller.

What is The Cat?

Launched on February 26, 2024, the platform draws heavily on what its competitors are doing in the sector, by offering a simple search box in the middle of an otherwise bare page. Type your first question and Le Chat will try to answer you as best it can by scrolling characters before your eyes. Its operation couldn’t be simpler, even if the tool is still in beta and therefore likely to encounter bugs or generate “hallucinations”.

In the announcement post, Mistral details the prowess of the “Large” language model which is hidden (among others) behind Le Chat. According to the company, this training base is more effective than GPT-3.5, Gemini Pro and LLaMA 2. Only the GPT-4 language model does better in general query understanding, according to Mistral. The chatbot speaks English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. A second language model cleverly nicknamed “Small” is intended to be “optimized for latency and cost […] making it a refined middle ground between our open weight offering [sic] and our flagship model“.

How to test Le Chat?

To test the prowess of the new hexagonal chatbot, however, you will need to show a little patience. Indeed, after a brief opening to the public, Le Chat is now accessible only by waiting list.

After creating your account on the platform, you will start queuing for the privilege of testing the French chatbot. No need to take out your credit card to hope for early access, paying users are treated the same way.

It should be noted that Le Chat, unlike the latest versions of ChatGPT, does not have access to the Web and therefore relies on a body of potentially outdated information on certain subjects. Question of moderation, Mistral indicates having thought about this problem “at system level» which allows the chatbot to notify you “when you steer the conversation in a sensitive or controversial direction“.

Chat, like ChatGPT, is just the general public example of what Mistral’s language model can do. Companies wishing to have access to the brain of the firm can also use the tool via Microsoft Azure or “La Plateforme”, the Mistral tool dedicated to business.

Source : Mistral