I've been using Mistral small/large a lot instead of ChatGPT. Coding capability is OK-ish. I feel like Mistral has more willingness to chat about controversial topics.

Free inference too, definitely try it out if you haven't: chat.mistral.ai

Mistral-Large is actually good on some tasks that ChatGPT has nerfed. 
Example, in a taxation task, the nerfed GPT4 provided incorrect calculation and eventually asked that I consult a professional taxman, Mistral Large did that in one prompt.
I strongly believe Mistral is in a strong position to compete with Closed Ai