Mistral launches its largest AI model yet as a European alternative

French AI company Mistral says its new Mistral Large 4 is its largest and most powerful model to date. The model, nicknamed Le Chonk, has one trillion parameters, with 49 billion able to be active at the same time.

Mistral says it has optimized the model for agentic workflows, coding and business use, including specific work in cybersecurity, finance and chip design. The company says it trained Mistral Large 4 using its own computing capacity, which consists of 4,000 Nvidia GPUs, and that this is substantially less capacity than is available to providers of closed models.

Mistral is positioning the model as a European option in a market where many advanced systems come from US or Chinese providers. It has open model weights, which can give organizations more ability to inspect and control the technology, while also creating security challenges. The model is initially available only through a public service with safety restrictions. Mistral plans to release the weights three weeks after launch, following further safety testing.

The company says it aims to make Mistral Large 4 the leading open-weight model and expects its focused training to help it compete with closed models in some areas. Chip design is also connected to Mistral’s investors, Dutch company ASML and Samsung. The launch is part of Mistral’s effort to show that a European company can build AI models that perform at the global forefront.