Mistral's speedy new assistant

PLUS: OpenAI co-founder abruptly exits Anthropic

Author

Rowan Cheung
February 07, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. DeepSeek had the AI world in a tailspin weeks ago, but another challenger from across the Atlantic sped into the AI assistant race in a big way.

This time, it’s not from China but from France, by the EU’s largest AI startup: Mistral. With blazing-fast responses, new features, and flexible deployment options, is the revamped ‘le Chat’ platform the next rival to steal the spotlight from Silicon Valley?

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Mistral revamps le Chat assistant

  • GitHub powers up Copilot with agentic features

  • Outreach automation with ChatGPT

  • OpenAI co-founder exits Anthropic

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MISTRAL

Image source: Mistral

The Rundown: French AI lab Mistral just unveiled new iOS and Android mobile apps for its ‘le Chat’ assistant, alongside a major platform update featuring enhanced response speeds and enterprise deployment options.

The details:

  • The app features core capabilities like web search, document processing, code interpreter, and image generation powered by BFL’s Flux Ultra model.

  • Mistral also introduced a new ‘Flash Answers’ feature that processes responses at over 10x the speed of competitors like ChatGPT and Claude.

  • New pricing tiers include a free plan, a Pro tier at $14.99/month, a Team tier at $24.99/user/month, and an Enterprise option with custom deployment.

  • Enterprise customers gain unique deployment flexibility with options for on-premise installation and custom model implementation.

Why it matters: While Mistral’s models aren’t the industry leaders, its focus on speed and flexible deployment options shows how the AI assistant wars are shifting from raw capabilities to practical advantages like performance and enterprise features – and could now have more of the features needed to entice a broader user base.

TOGETHER WITH CONVEYOR

The Rundown: Conveyor just launched Sue, the first AI Agent for Customer Trust — capable of taking on all the tasks that infosec teams dread like sharing NDA-gated documents, answering security questionnaires and everything in between. Perfect for B2B infosec teams sick of manual work.

Sue can do all of this for you:

  • Manage and complete customer security requests while communicating across systems and teams

  • Complete, reject, or escalate questionnaires based on parameters you set

  • Handle any questionnaire format with no manual tagging — even portals

  • Personalize your Trust Center using insights from conversation intelligence tools

MICROSOFT

Image source: GitHub

The Rundown: GitHub just announced several major updates to its Copilot assistant, including a new agent mode that can self-correct code, ‘Vision’ for image-to-code generations, an upcoming autonomous coding agent, and more.

The details:

  • Agent mode enables Copilot to independently iterate on code, fix runtime errors, and suggest terminal commands while inferring additional tasks.

  • A new Vision feature lets users generate code directly from inputted images and mockups, with automatic interface and alt text creation.

  • Copilot Edits is now generally available in VS Code, supporting multi-file changes with natural text commands and automatic suggested changes.

  • GitHub also teased Project Padawan, an autonomous coding agent coming this year that handles GitHub issues and generates fully tested pull requests.

Why it matters: When the AI coding boom first began, many saw it as a simple complement to human developers. But with constantly accelerating capabilities and emerging agentic features, we’re quickly moving from a completion tool to a true coding partner that can handle complex development tasks independently.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use ChatGPT o3-mini to automatically analyze company data and generate personalized outreach emails at scale using its reasoning and web search capabilities.

Step-by-step:

  1. Structure your company data with key details like name, contact info, and recent updates in a clear format for ChatGPT.

  2. Define your outreach goals and configure your AI prompt with instructions for tone and structure to generate personalized emails.

  3. Use o3-mini's web search to find new prospects and generate detailed emails based on their updates.

Pro tip: Create an automated workflow with Operator that searches for new companies, generates emails, and drafts them directly in your email client. The Rundown University members can access the top prompts here.

PRESENTED BY VAPI

The Rundown: Vapi offers an enterprise-grade platform to deploy voice AI agents in minutes, helping handle calls at scale while staying secure — no matter the use case or industry.

YC startups and Fortune 500 companies rely on Vapi for:

  • Flexible integration with your own data, APIs, or models

  • Scalability to millions of calls at <500ms latency

  • LLM guardrails and SOC-2 compliance

ANTHROPIC

Image source: UC Berkeley

The Rundown: OpenAI co-founder and key ChatGPT architect John Schulman has reportedly departed AI startup Anthropic after just five months, marking yet another significant shift from a top mind in the field.

The details:

  • Schulman originally joined Anthropic in August, citing a desire to focus more deeply on AI alignment research and hands-on technical work.

  • Schulman previously spent 9 years at OpenAI as part of the founding team and is credited as a key component of creating ChatGPT.

  • Neither Schulman nor Anthropic have detailed the reasons behind the unexpected departure.

  • Anthropic's chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, expressed support for Schulman's decision to pursue new opportunities in a statement to Bloomberg.

Why it matters: The sands at the top of the AI leaders are constantly shifting. Schulman’s initial move was viewed as a major shift to the safety-focused Anthropic — and while rumored to have an o3-level model behind closed doors, the startup’s pace of shipping (at least consumer-facing) has ground to a halt since 3.5 Sonnet.

QUICK HITS

  • ⚡ Concierge - AI Assistant that talks to your SaaS apps in real-time to update your CRM, create Jira tickets, summarize Slack, and more*

  • 🚀 Gemini 2.0 Pro - Google’s new advanced AI model with 2M token context

  • 🧠 Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking - Google’s latest AI reasoning model

  • 🥒 Pickle - Your AI body double for zoom calls

*Sponsored Listing

OpenAI is initiating a nationwide search for data center locations across 16 U.S. states to expand its $500B Stargate project beyond Texas.

U.S. bipartisan House lawmakers introduced legislation prohibiting Chinese AI app DeepSeek from being allowed on federal devices, citing national security concerns.

Rideshare giant Lyft is partnering with Anthropic to deploy Claude-powered AI tools across its platform for customer service, product testing, and more.

Google announced that AI-edited images created in Magic Editor's Reimagine feature on Pixel devices will now be tagged with DeepMind's SynthID watermarking tech.

Pika Labs launched Pikadditions, a new video-to-video feature that enables users to integrate any subject or object into existing footage.

TWO AI introduced SUTRA-R0, a multilingual reasoning model that surpasses DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1-mini in Indian language benchmarks.

COMMUNITY

Join our next workshop today at 4 PM EST to learn how to leverage OpenAI’s Deep Research tool, access open source alternatives, and create your own for free with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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