Mistral’s new 1T model aims to leapfrog closed and open rivals

Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday, a large multimodal model the French lab positions as an alternative to both closed models and open models often made in China. The model carries the nickname Le Chonk, a reference to its one trillion parameters.

ML4 is not an open-weight model yet. For now it can only be accessed through a public guardrail endpoint, and Mistral plans to make its weights available in three weeks, after safety testing is complete. Mistral VP of Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch that in the meantime the company will work with trusted partners and governments to ensure the open-source weights can be used to defend, but not to perform malicious attacks. Stock said security concerns have been mounting among Mistral's core audience of enterprises and institutions, while an open-weight model is easier to audit.

Stock said ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral's compute, using only 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which he described as two to three times less than the company's Chinese competitors and significantly less than closed source competitors. Benchmark results are still pending.

Stock said Mistral hopes ML4 will be best in class among open-weight models, especially outside China but not only there. He said focused training could let it outperform closed models in specific areas key to customers where multimodal capabilities add value. According to Stock, ML4's optimized use cases include cybersecurity and finance, as well as chip design, which is core to two of Mistral's main backers: Dutch giant ASML, which led its Series C, and Samsung, which led its Series D last month at a €21 billion valuation, about $24.39 billion.