Mistral AI.

In plain English

Mistral is a French AI company and one of Europe’s best-known AI labs. Its stated mission is to make advanced AI accessible to everyone. It presents itself as a European alternative to US and Chinese providers, with an emphasis on giving organisations more control over where and how they use AI.

Vibe, formerly called Le Chat, is Mistral’s AI assistant for chat, work, and coding. It is the product you use, in much the same way as ChatGPT is an OpenAI product. Behind it are Mistral’s models. Some are open weight, which means you can download and customise them, subject to their licence terms.

Mistral also puts emphasis on multilingual AI. It says Mistral Large 4 was trained on data covering more than 160 languages, including every official EU language.

Mistral also offers OCR, a document-reading service that extracts and structures information from files.

Models to know

Mistral Large 4 for demanding work, including coding and tasks involving different types of information. Mistral Small is a smaller open-weight model that can be downloaded and customised.

Who's in charge

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO.

Things to be aware of

Mistral says data on its services is hosted in the EU by default, but some features can temporarily transfer data outside the EU. Check the feature, settings, and contract rather than assuming everything stays in Europe.

Vibe’s data-training settings also depend on the plan. Individual users are not opted out by default, while Enterprise customers are. Check the settings before your team uploads company information.

If you use a Mistral model through another company’s cloud, or download and run it yourself, where the data goes depends on that setup. Choosing a European lab does not automatically make your use GDPR-compliant or remove any obligations under the EU AI Act.