Ecosia CEO says move from Mistral prioritizes open models and European hosting

Ecosia is moving away from Mistral to open AI models for lower costs, greater flexibility and reduced energy consumption, founder and CEO Christian Kroll told EU-Startups. He said the search engine would probably use Melious.ai, a German inference platform, rather than prioritize models by their country of origin. The models run on European infrastructure powered by low-carbon energy, keeping data processing in Europe. Kroll said Ecosia can switch models for sensitive questions, including those about Taiwan, and is working to remove political biases from its AI-generated answers.