Mistral launches Large 4 to take on closed and open AI rivals

Mistral has unveiled Large 4, a new multimodal AI model the French company says can compete with leading open-weight systems and challenge closed models on some tasks.

Nicknamed “Le Chonk,” Large 4 has 1.05 trillion parameters, with 49 billion active at a time. It can process text and images and has a one-million-token context window, according to Mistral’s model documentation. The company says it performs strongly in coding, cybersecurity, finance and manufacturing, and surpasses closed frontier models in visual grounding, the ability to connect details in an image with their real-world context.

Mistral says it trained Large 4 from scratch over two months on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own European data centers. The company is also serving the API preview on that infrastructure. Mistral is presenting both the model and the computing capacity behind it as a European alternative to AI systems controlled by US and Chinese companies.

Mistral is pitching Large 4 to organizations that want more control over how AI is deployed. “The cyber defence capabilities will enable enterprises and governments to defend themselves,” Mistral co-founder and chief scientist Guillaume Lample said at a press conference attended by Euronews. The company says the model can help defend against attacks using AI, though it has not named the benchmarks behind its broader comparisons with rival models.

Developers can try Large 4 through an API preview today. The preview costs $0.68 per million input tokens and $2.09 per million output tokens. Downloadable weights are expected on October 27.