Mistral, the French artificial intelligence start-up, on Wednesday released an open-weight model with one trillion parameters that it says can compete with the best systems built in the United States and China.
The model, Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, can be used and customized by anyone, Wired reported. It is available in a preview version now, with a final release due by the end of the month. Though built as a general-purpose system, it is optimized for coding and cyberdefense, along with work specific to manufacturing, finance, electrical engineering and other niches.
“There are a lot of areas where the other labs will not focus that much,” Guillaume Lample, a cofounder and the chief scientist at Mistral, told Wired. “There are so many domains in which you can improve models.”
Mistral describes Le Chonk as by far the most capable open-weight model developed outside China, and “very, very close” to some proprietary ones. The company also drew a contrast with its Chinese competitors: whereas Washington has accused Chinese labs of abusing distillation — training a smaller model on the outputs of a larger one — to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, Mistral said it trained its model from scratch.
The pitch to businesses is partly about price. Running an open-weight model costs only as much as the computing power it consumes, and Mistral argues that by narrowing the performance gap with closed systems and offering an alternative to Chinese releases, Le Chonk removes the last reasons a company might hesitate to go with open source.
“Mistral is still in the race of getting the best model,” Mr. Lample said. “This is the main message.”
Mistral has worked with less money and less computing power than OpenAI and Anthropic, and it has generally trailed them on performance, revenue and release frequency. Where the American labs charge premiums for their closed models, Mistral earns pay-as-you-go fees for running models through its cloud and sends engineers to customers to tune models to their needs.
Lately the French lab has been on a run. In September it raised $3.3 billion at a $24 billion valuation, the largest funding round ever for a European tech company, and its earnings have reportedly grown 20-fold in the past year or so.