IME nothing is as good out of the box as gpt4 for many tasks.

Is gpt4 as good in non-English uses? It's not clear to me that it would be particularly important or advantageous, but does Mistral being based in Europe and polyglot first make it interesting vs. gpt4 in some dimension?

I guess it might depend on language, but as a Spanish speaker who sometimes uses LLMs in Spanish, I'd say the gap between GPT-4 and most of the competition (Mistral included) is actually larger in Spanish than in English.

It's the best multilingual model out there and it's not even close.

Especially in terms of open models Mistral's are the most multilingual but outside a few handpicked ones the level of proficiency is just too poor for any real usage.

In my experience it’s not such a simple question. If you want to be able to speak in nuanced non-English and have it pick up on the intricacies, or have it respond in rich correct non-English, then it’s not the best model (Cohere recently released an aya model that I would recommend checking out if this is your use case).

If you want to be able to give basic commands and have the model reason about the logic behind your commands, gpt 4 is still the best, even in minority languages.

gpt4 is going to better than other models in every language except maybe chinese

Depends on the task. Gpt 4 isn't necessarily better at translation than Claude. I'm aware of no benchmarks on this.

From what I heard Gemini might be better at translation tasks than GPT4.

I don't disagree with you, but an open source model fine tuned for your use case, and embedded with your data is probably going to be way better at many companies uses cases than GPT4 is.

Yes, GPT-4 still rules, downside is it's expensive and relatively slow.

I'd say you should compare the models for your use case. Which is better depends on how much you're willing to pay, what kind of problems you need help with, speed, ease of use.