🇪🇺 Free ChatGPT alternative from Europe

Hi AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter. Today we have another colorful mix with stuff to try out and inspire you. And we're particularly excited about a new European update!

What we have in store for you:

• 🇪🇺 Free ChatGPT alternative from Europe

• 🛍️ AI is changing how we shop online

• 🤔 The post-web thesis: this is what the new internet looks like

Here we go!

🇪🇺 Free ChatGPT alternative from Europe

If you've been reading us for a while, then you know that we're always extremely happy to report on cool developments from Europe. Today it's that time again, and it's quite a stunner!

The European OpenAI (from 🇫🇷, to be precise), Mistral, has unveiled some great updates this week.

Pixtral - The new multimodal powerhouse

Pixtral is the new multimodal model from Mistral and beats the big models from Google, OpenAI and others in many of the standard tests. The exciting thing about Pixtral is that it now understands images and documents as well as text.

Thanks to the 128K context window, it can process either 30 high-resolution images or a 300-page book at the same time.

It's good to see a European model among the top models in the world!

Free ChatGPT alternative is impressive

But the most important and exciting update for us is the new Le Chat.

If you don't know Le Chat yet, it's basically the ChatGPT from Mistral. And the new version has a few banging updates. Let's dive in!

Le Chat essentially brings three major updates:

• Web search

• Image generation

• Canvas feature

Let's take a look at these in detail.

1) Le Chat can access the Internet

The web search works well in principle. Simply press the Web Search button and activate it. However, we still like the visual presentation of ChatGPT a little bit better.

2) Image generation via FLUX is ingenious

Probably the best news is that Le Chat can't just generate images. No, it generates the images with the FLUX model from BlackForestLabs 🇩🇪.

And this is one of our favorite models. The big advantage compared to ChatGPT: the pictures are really good. We hate ChatGPT images, especially when they have to be realistic ... FLUX is much better.

The collaboration between the French and the Black Forest is a real European alliance. We think that's great!

3) Canvas combines the best features

ChatGPT has also had a canvas feature for some time now, which we particularly appreciate when creating content.

And Claude from Anthropic also has a cool similar feature called Artifacts, which we use when working with code.

Le Chat combines the strengths of these two.

You can easily edit, extend, rewrite etc. parts of your texts.

And when you work with code, you not only see the code, but also the rendering in a preview. Which is pretty awesome!

Le Chat also has other exciting features, such as agents. But that goes beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Our take: Très bien, chez amis!

After a few hours of playing around, we have to say, Le Chat really is a great alternative to ChatGPT. And some things it does even better at the moment, such as image generation.

Oh, and now we almost forgot the most important benefit: Le Chat is currently completely FREE! 🤯🤯🤯🤯

You can use it here.

🛍️ AI is changing the way we shop online

Perplexity, the AI start-up that Google would probably love to buy up at the moment, has unveiled another new feature of its AI search engine.

This time it's all about online shopping. Perplexity has introduced a completely new way to shop online: directly from the search engine!

We don't really like writing about things you can't use right away. But we're making an exception here (you can at least try it out with a VPN if you are not in the US) - for good reason, as you'll see in a moment.

The most exciting feature we find is that Perplexity also understands more complex tasks. For example:

I would like to furnish my home office in a modern way. Budget: maximum 2,000 USD. What do I need for this?

Perplexity then provides a list with suggestions for the various furniture, decorations, etc.

You can even buy some of them with one click if you have a Perplexity Pro subscription. Perplexity has a program for e-commerce brands where you can register and offer Perplexity customers one-click purchasing.

Which is of course brilliant!

At the moment, Perplexity Shopping also has the advantage that there are no ads yet (these only come into play in the follow-up questions). Reviews are taken from the entire Internet and summarized.

We think this is a very exciting attack on Google, Amazon and the like.

At the same time, the user experience feels extremely good. And since 50% of the AInauten duo is based in the USA, we have already tried it out and it worked like a charm 😎.

You can try it yourself or watch the video:

🤔 The post-Web thesis: This is what the new Internet looks like

Finally, a topic that we stumbled across and had to think about constantly ever since ...

It's especially a topic for all entrepreneurs, investors and people who like to think about the future and the market.

Outlier Ventures has published their post-web thesis - and it completely changes how we think about the future of tech and the internet.

The biggest aha moment?

We are moving from an Attention Economy to an Intention Economy.

• Today's internet is designed to capture your attention.

• Tomorrow's internet will be designed to fulfill your intentions.

Most people only see Web3 (blockchain, crypto & co.) as crazy complexity that blocks adoption.

But Jamie Burke and the OV team see this as the basis for something much bigger: a new internet in which AI agents take over the complexity and we humans only express our intentions.

And this is no longer a theory. It's already happening:

The fusion of AI + Web3 creates the first infrastructure that turns intentions into results - without burning your attention.

Think about it:

• Web1 let us read.

• Web2 let us create.

• Web3 let us own.

• Post-Web will let us delegate.

Maybe you're a geek like us and would like to dive into the topic this weekend.

Here's the first chapter to read.

And here is the NotebookLM audio summary.

We made it! But no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new stuff for you.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

P.S.: Follow us on social media - that motivates us to keep going 😁!
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