A few weeks after the initial release of Mistral's AI assistant Le Chat, the company told Le Parisien it had reached 1 million downloads. In particular, Le Chat quickly reached the top spot for free downloads of the iOS App Store in its home country of France.
“Download and download LeChat made by Mistral, not open or anything else,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a television interview ahead of the recent AI Action Summit in Paris. He said.
Of course, this wasn't the first AI app to take off. In November 2023, Openai created a splash with the AI chatbot ChatGpt. Although initially restricted to US iOS users, it was able to attract 500,000 downloads in just six days. (ChatGPT has been downloaded 350 million times, according to the latest metrics in AppFigures.)
Between January 10th and January 31st, the mobile app for AI player Deepseek also recorded 1 million downloads. But it was just the beginning as the Chinese app went viral in late January.
Mistral is also facing competition from the big veteran high-tech companies. Google, Microsoft and others want to join AI assistant races and start with Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot to earn spots on mobile phone home screens.