AI Apps - Chatting more with Le Chat
In the last couple days I’ve started using Le Chat - the GenAI app from Mistral - more. Or, according to Le Chat, in French I have begun to parler plus avec Le Chat. I figure that translation can sub in for a lame joke about Vive Le France or similar. I’m continually using and assessing five or more GenAI apps and the rotation for most used changes every so often. This week NotebookLM is subbed off my mobile home screen and Le Chat is back in.
I wrote about Le Chat as an AI Hit back in February, but my usage of it hasn’t been heavy over recent months. So when I rotated NotebookLM out of the Starting 5, it felt natural to have Le Chat replace it. It’s still impressive and proving again that it is a solid contender among the top GenAI apps. It’s also quite a breath of fresh air feeling to use a leading GenAI app that is not from one of the Silicon Valley giants.
Like other leading models, Le Chat makes it easy to switch between its ‘Think’ and ‘Research’ modes. Think mode promises 10X speed, and it’s living up to that nicely. It feels as fast, or maybe even a tad faster, than any of the leading models right now. You can see it thought for all of one second before offering a very good response to my prompt about the current state of frontier AI and expectations for GPT 5:
Le Chat is keeping up with the GenAI Joneses (?) in terms of its tools and connections too. The connections are minimal (Gmail and Google Calendar), but it has a good set of tools:
Code interpreter
Image generation
Canvas (for document collaboration)
Web search - its knowledge cutoff is October 23, web search compensates for that
The research mode in Le Chat is very slick, cool to work with. I gave it the same prompt on frontier AI and GPT 5 expectations, this one:
What is the current state of frontier AI and what are the expectations around GPT 5
And the research was a little faster than I expected but clearly quite thorough, noting 177 sources:
The research results are excellent, and offer some nice sharing options - including saving as a PDF. The saved PDFs look great on my phone and in Google Drive on the desktop.
The research feature allows 35 searches per month with the pro version of Le Chat. I think that’s plenty, especially considering how good the responses are when using the Think mode.
Are any of you using Le Chat, adding a little French panache to your GenAI game? What’s your most used GenAI app right now?