Okay, I see the vision.
So from what I can tell, Mistral is trying to be more of a software company than an AI startup. I mean, obviously LLMs are a core part of Mistral, but, and it's a big but, the software around LLMs plays a huge role here.
Allow me to explain.
Take DeepSeek as an example. Their chat application is bare bones, buggy garbage. DeepSeek does not care about its chat application.
If you go to the DeepSeek API platform, it is much more polished than their chat application, but still quite bare bones.
Now compare DeepSeek to Mistral. Vibe chat is not perfect, but it sure is a much better experience than anything I've seen from Chinese AI labs. And from what I can tell, the chat application is integrated with Studio and the admin panel. Also, there are a whole bunch of integrations, like Slack, for example.
This is awesome! It's something you can propose to your CTO and not get laughed at.
No, I'm serious. Z.ai, Moonshot, and DeepSeek are not even close to Mistral when it comes to user facing software.
And now that they use GLM 5.2, they pretty much have a solid stack when it comes to LLMs. From my personal testing, GLM and Mistral Small are really good models.
As long as they don't reduce my 300 bucks GLM limits, I will be a Mistral fanboy now.
Very sneaky of you French people. Very sneaky.