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Mistral Releases Large 4 in Public Preview: A 1-Trillion-Parameter Multimodal Model With 49 Billion Active Parameters and Open Weights Promised

Mistral AI launched Mistral Large 4, a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal model with 49 billion active parameters, in public preview, with open weights promised after safety testing.

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Editor's Note ·

Clarification:
The article says Macron "has described the company's positioning as 'a third way in AI.'" TechCrunch's wording is that Mistral is aiming to leapfrog rivals "following what French president Macron described as 'a third way in AI'"; it does not say Macron was describing Mistral's positioning specifically.
Clarification:
The article describes Dense 200 as "the multimodal Dense 200 benchmark." Mistral's announcement presents Dense 200 as a visual-grounding result ("surpassing GPT-6-Astra on Dense 200 (42% vs 41%)"); the figures are Mistral's own.

Overview

Mistral AI has launched Mistral Large 4 (ML4), which the company describes as a 1 trillion-parameter natively multimodal model with 49 billion active parameters. Mistral said it is launching a public preview, with model weights due by the end of the month. TechCrunch reported that the model is nicknamed “Le Chonk” and that Mistral plans to release the weights in about three weeks, after safety testing is complete.

What We Know

  • Training. Mistral says ML4 was trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own European datacenters. TechCrunch described the figure as “only 4,000 Nvidia GPUs” and quoted Pierre Stock, Mistral’s VP Science, saying this is “two to three times less than our Chinese competitors, and significantly less than the closed source competitors.”
  • Pricing. The Mistral announcement lists API pricing of $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens.
  • Benchmarks (self-reported). According to Mistral, ML4 scores 61.7% on DeepSWE v1.1 and 28.3% on Terminal-Bench 4. On the multimodal Dense 200 benchmark, Mistral reports 42%, against 41% for GPT-6-Astra.
  • Focus areas. TechCrunch reported that Mistral optimized the model for cybersecurity, finance and chip design.
  • Funding context. Mistral said ML4 is the first milestone on the roadmap funded by its 3 billion euro Series D. TechCrunch reported that Samsung led the Series D last month, at a 21 billion euro valuation, and that Macron has described the company’s positioning as “a third way in AI”.

Weights and Safety Testing

Until the weights ship, Stock said, Mistral will “work with trusted partners and governments” so that the open weights can be used defensively rather than for malicious attacks, as TechCrunch reported.

What We Don’t Know

  • The benchmark results are Mistral’s own; the cited sources do not include independent replication.
  • The announcement text reviewed did not state a license for the weights, so the terms of the eventual release are unconfirmed.
  • The sources describe the weights timing differently (the end of the month versus about three weeks) and give different GPU counts (3,800 versus 4,000, the latter in TechCrunch’s wording).