I had a couple of sites bookmarked to circle back on: Nextchat.club and LibreChat. I’m not certain what they really are, just that they were on an AI startup leader board recently.
The other AI offering I haven’t visited in some time is Mistral. I liked the early Mistral models for coding. I also like that it’s based in France.
Nextchat.club
We can sign-up at nextchat.club/login:
in the Application area we can pick a persona. Here I’ll pick a resume writer
However, it didn’t pick up English and still gave me Chinese
I picked “Github Copilot”, but it shows me basically a prompt to pretend it’s Copilot
But my first prompt kicked me to a paywall
I can go to billing to top off
Which will let me use crypto or alipay - perhaps this is why it was topping to AI popularity charts
LibreChat
Let’s try the demo
I need to accept the EULA
I tried an OpenAI prompt and it just wants a key and I would never drop a valid key of my own into some trial page
But every model wants a key
Mistral AI
Let’s do the “Try for free”
So I started with what I thought would be a simple ask - ASCII art of “POOP” and didn’t get a right answer
I got the same answer twice
I even tried “thinking”
Perhaps ASCII isn’t it’s forte. I asked for a ROT13 one-liner
That looks about right
$ echo -n "Enter text: " ; read text ; echo "$text" | tr 'A-Za-z' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'
The best part of ROT 13 is we can test by just feeding it back on itself:
I asked it to create an image next. How about a Spork?
I mean, it is a spoon and a fork - it got that part right. But not your typical spork.
Same with my request for Open Heart Surgery:
I asked for a diagram of a well architected 2-tier web app in GCP:
That is clone - but not quite right. A CDN wouldn’t point to the compute. You might have a global LB or ALB point to both a CDN and compute instance though
But tweaking Mermaid would be a lot easier than trying to use the noisy mess Gemini Pro returned on the same query:
I then went back to Gemini and gave it a more specific prompt: “Create a simplified 2D architecture for a 2-tier web app in GCP that features: Key Components: Global Load Balancer: Distributes incoming traffic across regions. Cloud CDN: Caches static content for faster delivery. Compute Engine/App Engine: Hosts the web application logic. Cloud SQL: Managed relational database (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL). Memorystore: Redis-based caching for performance. Cloud Storage: Stores static assets (images, videos, etc.). VPC: Isolates resources in a private network. Firewall Rules: Controls traffic flow for security.”
That largely matches what I thought.
I swear that some of these AI tools make me start second guessing myself on architecture sometimes.
For giggles, I tried in on vomit trash AI tool:
I tried Copilot as well
It has a lot of almost there diagrams:
Back to AI images… I asked for a bloody evil clown as a lot of tools block things like that:
One last one - logos. How about one for FBS?
Not bad:
That hit my free tier limit (not sure if daily). I was curious how much the upgrade would be:
Summary
I plan to come back to Mistral later to see how it when my quota comes back (or doesn’t). I’m not going to use xai or grok. I almost wrote a block in here for that trash but realized my utter disdain would just render it a rant session.
I was really quite surprised how much I got for free in Mistral just poking around - more than I would have expected. I’ll have to consider Mistral vs Copilot next time that comes up as the $10/mo Copilot doesn’t give that much.