My choice of paid AI is probably strange to most … besides Gemini, which is assigned to me at work (meaning, work pays for it), I’m personally paying for … Mistral. Mistral is seen as Europe’s leading AI service alternative to US services.

You’d think I’d go for Claude, and it IS tempting, as I do admire their workflows, and how they package their setup. (Skills, and Claude Code is quite a banger.)

But Claude was a snooty bitch when I tried to sign up with my personal email (verification codes never came), and its token limits were annoying. And then, admittedly, I hate its leaderships’ constant sabre rattling against China, fear-mongering ways and callous disregard for humanity’s safety. Anthropic seems driven by greed, so the thought of supporting it financially annoyed me a little bit. So, I suppose being sniffed at by Claude was a good thing.

To clarify, I didn’t choose Mistral because I have an anti-US-AI streak. I’m too pragmatic for that. I still use the free versions for all US AI models. Mostly for research.

I went for Mistral because I didn’t need to do wild stuff with my AI, not because it was a “purer” company than US-based ones. It just doesn’t do as many reckless things.

I hope.

Funnily enough, one of Mistral’s unique selling points is that it is not a US based company lmao.

But a reminder: most AI companies are just driven by a drive to succeed, either to get more money or to get more power, so it’s something we have to soberly accept if we throw money at them.

I really don’t need my LLMs/AI to be bleeding edge frontier stuff

Most of the time I rely on open source AI such as Deepseek (which has recently upped its game with v4, which doesn’t rely on Nvidia chips – a seismic game changer.

My AI colleagues do simple stuff like translate from Mandarin to English to help me learn (Deepseek), clean up transcripts (Qwen), do simple grammar edits (Qwen) and help me organize my thoughts for my personal writing projects (Mistral, Qwen, Deepseek).

As you can see, I use the AI mostly for writing, but still retain full control of my writing.

My primary method is dictation as I write 4x faster that way. (I use Otter or Windows’ Windows+H command to dictate.)

I tell AI to use up to 90% of my original words and then clean it up. I will then revise it further, adding more flair and finesse. Occasionally, when I’m especially brain dead, I’d ask it to help me improve the flow by suggesting how to move around pieces of my transcript to a coherent narrative.

I don’t need to fully automate my life: I’ve already built simple agents with Gemini at work. It automates some of my workflows but it’s nothing fancy in the world of agentic AI.

Another reason why I chose Mistral

It’s not a prude.

Yes, sometimes I do write fiction with a spicy edge, and there’s nothing more annoying than an AI clutching its pearls and muttering at you, “How dare you besmirch my chips with your filth!”

ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, Qwen, Gemini – all of them are prudish, and would seize up the moment you talk about body parts. It would throw out your uploads that have some spicy scenes and turn away like a delicate miss, saying that my content is forbidden.

Well, eff that.

Sure, there are workarounds to make these models do stuff, and there’s a way to nerf them too. But why go through all that trouble when Mistral, like the French, don’t hyperventilate when you talk about sexy matters.

For me, the future may not be Mistral

As convenient as Mistral is, eventually, I hope to build my own Open Source AI system locally. Because that’s the way to go. Also I’m rebellious that way; I hate being beholden, gatekeeped or walled-in by any company with fuzzy morals. However, right now I just don’t have time to learn the ropes to climb the very steep mountain to get there.

I don’t know, I guess I’m a rebel like that. Hate sending money to hype machines even if the hype is half deserved.

What AI service do you pay for? And if you use open sourced stuff, what do you use?