My Second Try with Mistral
It is time again to reconsider which AIs I pay for. So I canceled my Google subscription - Gemini 2.5 pro is very good, especially regarding code generation, but the CLI does not convince me; it's simply not my way of working. And the other features of Gemini, such as the ability to produce exhaustingly long and pretentious 20-page analysis documents for any question, are more amusing than useful.
And then there's Google, the data octopus, and I assume sooner or later all my chats will become part of my profile that Google uses to provide advertisers with tailored advertising for me. And Google is American. So, away with it, and try Mistral again, the only significant European LLM.
My last attempt with Mistral was about a year ago and was sobering. As accurate and hallucination-free answers as possible are essential; an AI that does this significantly worse than another is useless. Now Mistral has Memories, Projects, Reflecting, and Searching; it's time to try it again.
The first task: write this blog post. I provide simple text, and it converts it into HTML based on CSS and another HTML entry, both a _de and an _en version. And as a reference, I do the same with ChatGPT 5 and Mistral.
This worked better than expected
The result of the test you can see for yourself, dear reader. Mistral has generated the relevant HTML texts cleanly and consistently with the existing pages, made a decent English translation, and linked everything correctly. If you are interested, the translation from ChatGPT - similar, perhaps subtly a bit better, but there is nothing to complain about.
Strange though, that the actual response from the AI are apparent links to 4 HTML texts that you cannot click. To get the source text that you want to copy, you have to look at the thought process.
Mistral has adjusted its memories accordingly afterward. I'm curious to see if it can also handle a second text in a separate chat of the same project well.
Summary of my first impression
Mistral has improved quite nicely. The AI is fast, powerful, and probably adheres to European data protection regulations better than Google. I will try to send my requests to it first before asking ChatGPT (also American, though not a data octopus yet?).
About the subscription
For just under 20 euros a month, you get the latest model, seemingly unlimited "reflections", i.e., reasoning, and 35 long searches with internet searches and long result documents, and these memories, which are still unclear to me. Should fit.