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

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It refuses to summarize? I thought that's the main selling point of ChatGPT?

It also will summarize text from WSJ or the  NYT when I input the actual text from articles. Both Gemini and ChatGPT refuse to do that even when I  copy in the text

Could this willingness to discuss more controversial topics be because it is led by a Europe-based team vs US one?

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Have you been using it locally or on a platform of some kind?

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