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Tom's Guide
a day ago
- Tom's Guide
Forget ChatGPT and Gemini — this lesser-known chatbot just ranked No. 1 for privacy
If you use AI every single day, you are likely giving up a lot of personal data, more than you might realize. It has not always been entirely clear which of the AI chatbots are best when it comes to your privacy. While there are some options that have never exactly pretended to be too worried about privacy (looking at you Deepseek), others sit in somewhat murky waters. Well, now we have a better understanding thanks to a new report, which ranks AI and large language models based on their data privacy. This includes 9 of the biggest AI systems, including all of the names you'll know well, and some other lesser-known ones, too. Not only does the report provide a No. 1 option for privacy (a surprising one at that), but it also ranks them based on a number of more specific privacy categories. So which is the best AI chatbot for your privacy? It's Le Chat. Not heard of it? You're not alone. While Mistral has built up a cult following, it hasn't had the same commercial success as the likes of OpenAI or Deepseek. The French AI company was founded in 2023 and has quickly made a mark. It is funded by Microsoft and was founded by three French AI researchers, including a former employee of Google DeepMind. According to the research, Le Chat is limited in its data collections and, unlike most of its competitors, is incredibly limited in who it will share data with. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. While Le Chat doesn't have the same financial backing or amount of testing data as the likes of OpenAI, it is a rapidly growing option. In our testing, we've been especially impressed with its speed of response. It does, however, struggle with more detailed responses. It's good news for the world's most popular chatbot. ChatGPT landed just behind Le Chat in the rankings. While Le Chat can only share user prompts with service providers, OpenAI can also share them with affiliates. OpenAI was, however, the highest rated in terms of transparency on data privacy and scored highly for its low level of data collection. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Meta was the least private AI chatbot in 9th, followed quickly by Gemini at 8th and Copilot just behind it at 7th. Deepseek fell in 6th place, and Claude came 4th. In terms of data collection and sharing, Meta AI was the worst one by quite some way, almost doubling the score of the next worst, Gemini. If privacy is a big concern for you when it comes to AI, the good news is that plenty of great AI chatbots scored well here. Mistral is a great option if you're willing to try something new, but equally, ChatGPT is just behind it across the board. Two of the other biggest competitors came just behind with Grok in 3rd and Anthropic's Claude in 4th. All four of these are not only scoring high on privacy tests but also happen to be some of the best-performing AI chatbots available right now. It is surprising to see such big names like Meta AI, Gemini, and Copilot so far down the list. The report explains that this is mostly down to how much data they share and how unclear their data privacy policies are.
Euronews
3 days ago
- Business
- Euronews
Which AI chatbot is the best at protecting your privacy?
Mistral AI's Le Chat is the least privacy-invasive generative artificial intelligence model when it comes to data privacy, a new analysis has found. Incogni, a personal information removal service, used a set of 11 criteria to assess the various privacy risks with large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, xAI's Grok, Anthropic's Claude, Inflection AI's Pi AI and China-based DeepSeek. Each platform was then scored from zero, being the most privacy-friendly to one, being the least-friendly on that list of criteria. The research aimed to identify how the models are trained, their transparency, and how data is collected and shared. Among the criteria, the study looked at the data set used by the models, whether user-generated prompts could be used for training and what data, if any, could be shared with third parties. What sets Mistral AI apart? The analysis showed that French company Mistral AI's so-called Le Chat model is the least privacy-invasive platform because it collects 'limited' personal data and does well on AI-specific privacy concerns. Le Chat is also one of the few AI assistant chatbots in the study that would only provide user-generated prompts to its service providers, along with Pi AI. OpenAI's ChatGPT comes second in the overall ranking because the company has a 'clear' privacy policy that explains to users exactly where their data is going. However, the researchers noted some concerns about how the models are trained and how user data 'interacts with the platform's offerings'. xAI, the company run by billionaire Elon Musk that operates Grok, came in third place because of transparency concerns and the amount of data collected. Meanwhile, Anthropic's Claude model performed similarly to xAI but had more concerns about how models interact with user data, the study said. At the bottom of the ranking is Meta AI, which was the most privacy invasive, followed by Gemini and Copilot. Many of the companies at the bottom of the ranking don't seem to let users opt out of having prompts that they generated used to further train their models, the analysis said.
TechCrunch
10-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models
French AI lab Mistral is getting into the reasoning AI model game. On Tuesday morning, Mistral announced Magistral, its first family of reasoning models. Like other reasoning models — e.g. OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro — Magistral works through problems step-by-step for improved consistency and reliability across topics such as math and physics. Magistral comes in two flavors: Magistral Small and Magistral Medium. Magistral Small is 24 billion parameters in size, and is available for download from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. (Parameters are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior.) Magistral Medium, a more capable model, is in preview on Mistral's Le Chat chatbot platform and the company's API, as well as third-party partner clouds. '[Magistral is] suited for a wide range of enterprise use cases, from structured calculations and programmatic logic to decision trees and rule-based systems,' writes Mistral in a blog post. '[The models are] fine-tuned for multi-step logic, improving interpretability and providing a traceable thought process in the user's language.' Founded in 2023, Mistral is a frontier model lab building a range of AI-powered services, including the aforementioned Le Chat and mobile apps. It's backed by venture investors like General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. Despite its formidable resources, Mistral has lagged behind other leading AI labs in certain areas, like developing reasoning models. Magistral doesn't appear to be an especially competitive release, either, judging by Mistral's own benchmarks. On GPQA Diamond and AIME, tests that evaluate a model's physics, math, and science skills, Magistral Medium underperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4. Magistral Medium also fails to surpass Gemini 2.5 Pro on a popular programming benchmark, LiveCodeBench. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Perhaps that's why Mistral touts Magistral's other strengths in its blog post. Magistral delivers answers at '10x' the speed of competitors in Le Chat, Mistral claims, and supports a wide array of languages, including Italian, Arabic, Russian, and Simplified Chinese. 'Building on our flagship models, Magistral is designed for research, strategic planning, operational optimization, and data-driven decision making,' the company writes in its post, 'whether executing risk assessment and modelling with multiple factors, or calculating optimal delivery windows under constraints.' The release of Magistral comes after Mistral debuted a 'vibe coding' client, Mistral Code. A few weeks prior to that, Mistral launched several coding-focused models and rolled out Le Chat Enterprise, a corporate-focused chatbot service that offers tools like an AI agent builder and integrates Mistral's models with third-party services like Gmail and SharePoint.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What is Mistral AI? Everything to know about the OpenAI competitor
Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France's most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low. However, the recent launch of its chat assistant on mobile app stores was met with some hype, particularly in its home country. 'Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,' French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris. While this wave of attention may be encouraging, Mistral AI still faces challenges in competing with the likes of OpenAI — and in doing so while keeping up with its self-definition as 'the world's greenest and leading independent AI lab.' Mistral AI has raised significant amounts of funding since its creation in 2023 with the ambition to 'put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.' While this isn't a direct jab at OpenAI, the slogan is meant to highlight the company's advocacy for openness in AI. Its alternative to ChatGPT, chat assistant Le Chat, is now also available on iOS and Android. It reached 1 million downloads in the two weeks following its mobile release, even grabbing France's top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store. This comes in addition to Mistral AI's suite of models, which includes: Mistral Large 2, the primary large language model replacing Mistral Large. Pixtral Large, unveiled in 2024 as a new addition to the Pixtral family of multimodal models. Mistral Medium 3, released in May 2025 with the promise of providing efficiency without compromising performance, and best for coding and STEM tasks. Devstral, an AI model designed for coding and openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. Codestral, an earlier generative AI model for code, but whose license banned commercial applications. 'Les Ministraux,' a family of models optimized for edge devices such as phones. Mistral Saba, focused on Arabic language. In March 2025, the company introduced Mistral OCR, an optical character recognition (OCR) API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest. Mistral AI's three founders share a background in AI research at major U.S. tech companies with significant operations in Paris. CEO Arthur Mensch used to work at Google's DeepMind, while CTO Timothée Lacroix and chief scientist officer Guillaume Lample are former Meta staffers. Co-founding advisers also include Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (also a board member) and Charles Gorintin from health insurance startup Alan, as well as former digital minister Cédric O, which caused controversy due to his previous role. Not all of them. Mistral AI differentiates its premier models, whose weights are not available for commercial purposes, from its free models, for which it provides weight access under the Apache 2.0 license. Free models include research models such as Mistral NeMo, which was built in collaboration with Nvidia that the startup open-sourced in July 2024. While many of Mistral AI's offerings are free or now have free tiers, Mistral AI plans to drive some revenue from Le Chat's paid tiers. Introduced in February 2025, Le Chat's Pro plan is priced at $14.99 a month. On the purely B2B side, Mistral AI monetizes its premier models through APIs with usage-based pricing. Enterprises can also license these models, and the company likely also generates a significant share of its revenue from its strategic partnerships, some of which it highlighted during the Paris AI Summit. Overall, however, Mistral AI's revenue is reportedly still in the eight-digit range, according to multiple sources. In 2024, Mistral AI entered a deal with Microsoft that included a strategic partnership for distributing its AI models through Microsoft's Azure platform and a €15 million investment. The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) swiftly concluded that the deal didn't qualify for investigation due to its small size. However, it also sparked some criticism in the EU. In January 2025, Mistral AI signed a deal with press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) to let Chat query the AFP's entire text archive dating back to 1983. Mistral AI also secured strategic partnerships with France's army and job agency, shipping giant CMA, German defense tech startup Helsing, IBM, Orange, and Stellantis. In May 2025, Mistral AI announced it would participate in the creation of an AI Campus in the Paris region, as part of a joint venture with UAE-investment firm MGX, NVIDIA, and France's state-owned investment bank Bpifrance. As of February 2025, Mistral AI raised around €1 billion in capital to date, approximately $1.04 billion at the current exchange rate. This includes some debt financing, as well as several equity financing rounds raised in close succession. In June 2023, and before it even released its first models, Mistral AI raised a record $112 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sources at the time said the seed round — Europe's largest ever — valued the then-one-month-old startup at $260 million. Other investors in this seed round included Bpifrance, Eric Schmidt, Exor Ventures, First Minute Capital, Headline, JCDecaux Holding, La Famiglia, LocalGlobe, Motier Ventures, Rodolphe Saadé, Sofina, and Xavier Niel. Only six months later, it closed a Series A of €385 million ($415 million at the time), at a reported valuation of $2 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from existing backer Lightspeed, as well as BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, Conviction, Elad Gil, General Catalyst, and Salesforce. The $16.3 million convertible investment that Microsoft made in Mistral AI as part of their partnership announced in February 2024 was presented as a Series A extension, implying an unchanged valuation. In June 2024, Mistral AI then raised €600 million in a mix of equity and debt (around $640 million at the exchange rate at the time). The long-rumored round was led by General Catalyst at a $6 billion valuation, with notable investors, including Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and others. Mistral is 'not for sale,' Mensch said in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 'Of course, [an IPO is] the plan.' This makes sense, given how much the startup has raised so far: Even a large sale may not provide high enough multiples for its investors, not to mention sovereignty concerns depending on the acquirer. However, the only way to definitely squash persistent acquisition rumors is to scale its revenue to levels that could even remotely justify its nearly $6 billion valuation. Either way, stay tuned. This story was originally published on February 28, 2025 and will be regularly updated. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
French startup Mistral launches chatbot for companies, triples revenue in 100 days
Mistral AI on Wednesday launched its Le Chat chatbot for corporate use, and its CEO said the French startup has tripled its revenue in the last 100 days, with demand coming particularly from outside the United States. Paris-based Mistral AI, founded two years ago, launched the open source version of its Le Chat assistant in February. The enterprise version now connects with content management systems such as Microsoft's SharePoint and Google Drive. "In the last 100 days we have tripled our business, in particular in Europe and outside of the U.S.," CEO Arthur Mensch told journalists. "We've been... growing in the U.S. quite fast as well," Mensch said. Mistral, which is valued at $6 billion, does not publicly disclose its revenue, but was reported by one trade publication to have revenue of $30 million last year. Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump completed 100 days in office in his second term, which has been marked by a strained relationship with Europe due to his trade policies and controversial diplomatic actions. Mistral is operating its own compute capabilities and reducing its dependency on cloud providers, allowing the company to offer customers a service that does not depend on the U.S. companies, Mensch said. A company can also deploy Le Chat on its own cloud infrastructure without needing Mistral to manage its data.
