With all the news about ChatGPT, Copilot, and DeepSeek, you might think that the US and China are the two main players at the head of the AI pack, with everyone else lagging behind. But that’s not necessarily true.
Some European alternatives are making waves. For example, last week’s update for the France-based AI chatbot Le Chat integrated an image generator based on a German AI model from the company Black Forest Labs. That’s Franco-German collaboration par excellence.
According to Mistral, the company behind Le Chat, this AI chatbot is the fastest in the world, capable of generating up to 1,100 tokens per second. (That’s about 13 times faster than ChatGPT’s 85 tokens per second.) And not only does the AI respond quickly to prompts, it also draws on in-depth knowledge from a wide variety of sources for robust answers.
According to the update blog post, it’s now possible to generate photorealistic images using Le Chat. Fittingly, a prompt with a cat drinking tea was shown as an example.
Le Chat
Le Chat is a free app for Android and iOS, but you can also try out the AI tool directly in your browser. Apparently, the maximum permitted requests are limited at a certain point, at which point you’ll have to register. Later, you may even need to subscribe at $14.99 per month, but this is explicitly aimed at power users.
In general, the European chatbot makes a good impression. It responds quickly and precisely and can also explain complex issues. Le Chat could soon establish itself as an alternative to the current top dogs.
Further reading: ChatGPT’s AI search beats Google at this one thing
