Ecosia is abandoning Mistral, deemed to be ‘a year behind’, in favour of open-source models including Qwen, GLM and Kimi

The Berlin-based search engine, used by German government departments and the NHS, is dropping the French AI five months after selecting it and says it has halved its costs.

Ecosia is changing AI provider again. In May, the German search engine replaced OpenAI with Mistral; its founder and CEO Christian Kroll now explains to POLITICO that he is disappointed with the quality of the French models, which he believes is a year behind the competition. He also cites recurring server overloads, with Ecosia describing itself as too big a customer for Mistral, as well as doubts about the truly sovereign nature of a company financed by foreign investors.

Open models, including Chinese

Ecosia runs through the Melious platform, which hosts open-weight models, including China's Qwen, GLM, and Kimi. According to Kroll, the operation cut costs in half while improving quality. He believes that the political biases of these models can be corrected technically; Rasmus Rothe, from the German AI Association, nuances: explicit censorship is removed by retraining, more subtle biases embedded in the data much less so.

On the Mistral side, co-founder Guillaume Lample invited Ecosia to try out its new Large 4 model, released this week, by offering early access.