👨‍🚀 Scary AI experiment on Reddit

Hello AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter! Today we're talking about tools, ChatGPT alternatives and social media AI experiments.

Here's what we have in store for you:

• 🇪🇺 le Chat in detail - The European answer to ChatGPT

• 🔥 These are the top 100 AI tools

• 😲 Scary AI experiment on Reddit

Here we go!

🇪🇺 le Chat in detail - The European answer to ChatGPT

Over the last few days, we have received an increasing number of inquiries whether there are any good European alternatives to US tools such as ChatGPT and the like.

Of course, the daily news about the global economy is kind of crazy. We can understand these thoughts, and today we want to briefly introduce you to the best European alternative to ChatGPT and the company behind it.

We are, of course, talking about Mistral from France and their chatbot tool le Chat.

First things first: in our opinion, OpenAI, Anthropic and co. are still a step ahead in the overall package. And we don't believe that the world will fall apart.

But Mistral is really extremely strong and there are a few things where Mistral is even better than the competitors mentioned.

Let's dive in and give you some reasons to try le Chat and Mistral right away.

Usability, speed, price

As you can see above, le Chat looks like any other chatbot client. You have tools to choose from such as Web Search, Code Interpreter and Canvas.

What is immediately noticeable when using le Chat is the incredible speed at which responses are received.

When it comes to image generation, Mistral works together with Black Forest Labs from Germany, which is also a leader in image generation with its FLUX models.

You can use most of the features in the free version. And even if you become a power user, at 17 euros you're still a little cheaper than the main American chatbots.

(And if price is an important factor, you can also use tools like ChatLLM, which combines all the major text, image and video models under one roof for $10/month.)

Libraries for the management of assets

We think the libraries are a super cool feature! This is a kind of document folder in which you can collect documents, websites etc. on a specific topic.

These are similar in structure to the projects in ChatGPT or Claude. But what's cool is that you can quickly add them individually to each chat, even several at once. This results in very exciting use cases!

You can find some videos on the various features here.

Data protection and security

As a European company, Mistral AI is subject to strict data protection guidelines, in particular the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This means that your data is safe and secure.

Mistral also follows an open source approach, which creates a great deal of transparency. This is also exciting for companies, as Mistral offers the option of hosting le Chat completely in your own environment.

Cultural proximity

Ok, this point is more a feeling of ours than something we can back up with data. Le Chat seems to understand the cultural and linguistic nuances of Europe better than many of the US providers.

Which is often reflected in the texts it churns out. We love using it to write texts for advertisements, blog articles etc.

Maybe it's because more weight has been given to the European training data? We have no idea - but we think the results are great!

One of the best document recognition tools (OCR)

If you work a lot with photos, long documents, PDFs and the like, Mistral is really great. Its own OCR model sets new standards for long PDFs with tables, images etc.

This is also very exciting for automation specialists. In our AI + Automation Community last week, we posted a short video of our automated document capture for accounting, integrating the Mistral OCR model directly via the API.

Support for the European economy

So, now to the last point, which was also the starting point of this topic.

By using le Chat, you are supporting a European company and helping to strengthen Europe's technological sovereignty. Which never hurts.

If you are interested in the topic of European AI, one of the most exciting conferences on the subject is taking place in Berlin in less than two weeks' time. The theme of this year's Rise of AI is "Good News From Europe"!

The event takes place on May 14 in Berlin. We'll be there too, and AInauts get a 20% discount - click here for tickets. We're looking forward to meeting some AInauts in person!

🔥 These are the top 100 AI tools

When we look at our survey, which all new AInauten newsletter subscribers receive directly after signing up (thanks for filling it out!), we see one of the biggest challenges with over 58%: Finding the right tools!

We get the idea. The abundance of AI tools can be overwhelming. Basically, we believe that it is not the tools that are decisive, but your own structured system, coupled with comprehensive knowledge such as prompt engineering.

Despite everything, it is still early days, and you shouldn't become too dependent on individual tools. We are currently working on the ultimate guide that should finally solve this main problem for many AInauts. However, we still need a few more weeks.

Until then, perhaps a look at the 100 most used AI tools, which is published every 6 months by venture capital giant a16z, can help.

"If I use one of the top apps, I won't be that wrong!"

In this list, you'll find an app for just about every topic.

• Chatbots: ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude

• Search: Perplexity

• Audio: Suno, ElevenLabs

• Video Hailuo, Kling AI

• Images: LeonardoAI, Midjourney, Photoroom, Ideogram

And until our guide is finished, you should be able to cope with this. 😉 

What surprised us

If you look at the list above, you will probably recognize many logos and many not. Every year, tools such as character.ai, JanitorAI or SpicychatAI are also at the top of the list. These platforms are all about so-called role-play chatbots.

There are specially trained chatbots for all categories that you can chat with. In addition to very classic ones such as brainstorm bots, job interview trainers or language learning bots, the platforms are full of the most ridiculous bots you can imagine. And, of course, it quickly moves into the NSFW area.

What we find particularly exciting is how incredibly large these platforms have become and how many users they have!

Character.ai is in 3rd place 🤯.

And they are also extremely innovative. For example, CharacterAI has just introduced a new AI video feature, AvatarFX. This allows you to turn any image into talking and gesturing avatars.

And in great quality and length. We are still waiting until it is rolled out in our account, but you can already take a look at some examples here:

😲 Scary AI experiment on Reddit

Finally, we come to a somewhat scary AI experiment conducted by the University of Zurich on Reddit.

What happened?

Reddit has revealed that researchers from the University of Zurich secretly conducted an AI experiment on the platform. The researchers had AI bots join in discussions in the r/changemyview community - on sensitive topics, without anyone knowing they were talking to an AI!

The bots pretended to be real people, sometimes even trauma survivors, therapists or counselors. Some bots analyzed users' post histories to develop personalized persuasion strategies.

The unofficial result: these targeted AI responses were a whopping 6x more persuasive than the average human comment.

What's so exciting about it?

Regardless of whether you think the experiment is good or not - Reddit is anything but enthusiastic and is suing the University of Zurich - above all, it shows that AI makes it very easy to manipulate and centrally control opinions, and on a grand scale!

But we don't just want to be amazed, we also want to learn. How the Zurich team set up their chatbots is particularly exciting:

In the graphic above, you can see the structure of the bot workflow. The details are a bit too much for here, we'll be rebuilding the automation for our AI + Automation community soon.

But what we can all learn from it:

• They use different language models (GPT, Claude, Llama) to formulate responses to posts.

• Then they give all the answers again to their own ranker (here based on Claude), which then finds the best answer that is posted.

This approach is fascinating, especially if you produce your own content, for example. And the setup doesn't have to be complicated at all: via OpenRouter, for example, you can generate LinkedIn posts from four different models and then send the responses to ChatGPT, where they are evaluated according to various criteria.

This gives you maximum creativity in a wide range of models and, ideally, the best result is quickly served up on a silver platter!

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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