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

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

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Yes if it gathers that it’s from paywalled content, even if you have access to it and copy and paste it, it refuses. 

Mistral will do it though

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