For the past few years, Mistral has tried to carve itself a name as Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s AI giants, moving from smaller, open models to heavyweight systems like Mistral Large 3 in late 2025. After raising €3 billion in September 2026, the French start-up has doubled down on its ambition to compete with leading US and Chinese AI developers. Now, the company is trying again to take on the AI behemoths with Mistral Large 4, a massive open-weight model built for coding, complex reasoning, image analysis, and business automation.

AI models need huge amounts of data to train on, and researchers are warning that AI companies could run out of high-quality public data to use. Your own data isn't safe; even if you're unaware of it, AI companies may be training their models on your social media posts and more.

Running a capable language model entirely offline used to mean owning a powerful desktop. That assumption no longer holds. On my hardware, a phone app from Google runs the same model noticeably faster than Ollama does on my PC, and the reasons are more interesting than you might expect.

Most of us download and install new apps and self-hosted services without a second thought, but if you do anything important on your PC, it can be a significant security risk.

Google’s Antigravity is an AI-first coding environment built on the bones of VS Code. It gets less attention than Gemini, yet it may be the company’s most interesting AI product. The key word here is most interesting, though, not better. Here’s what it does, where it impresses, and where it still frustrates.

Do you, like me, obsess over your Claude sessions, trying to optimize everything down to a single token? If so, you’re in good company — I’ve been trying everything to stretch my $20 Claude Pro subscription as far as I can. However, all your tweaks and adjustments only work if you’re building them on a solid foundation. As it turns out, the way I was using Claude was actually working against me and inflating my token usage from the very first message.

I don't know about you, but I have more bills, invoices, bank statements, and healthcare documents than I know what to do with. Finding a specific detail, understanding a complicated term, or comparing this month's charges with last month's can take up more time than I'd like, not to mention the frustration involved. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can make this much easier, but I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of handing my financial, medical, or other sensitive information over to big tech companies just to get a few questions answered. I have enough concerns about how much data these companies collect without voluntarily giving them more.

AI agents have moved well beyond answering questions. They can now open folders, write code, and click through websites on your behalf. Here are three of the wildest things I’ve handed over to them, and what each one taught me about where this technology actually helps.

Cursor made AI-assisted coding feel effortless, but its subscription and cloud dependence left me looking for something leaner. Cline, an open-source extension for VS Code, covered most of what I needed, including working fully offline with local models.