French company Mistral released a public preview of Mistral Large 4, abbreviated as ML4, codenamed le Chonk, on Tuesday. The company claims it is a native multimodal model with 1 trillion parameters, activating 49 billion parameters during inference, and is the largest model the company has developed to date. The preview interface is now available on Mistral Studio, with weights expected to be released by the end of this month.

The company focuses on code, agent processes, and multimodal understanding, claiming to excel in vertical tasks such as cybersecurity, manufacturing, and finance. WIRED's chief scientist Guillaume Lample stated that other labs will not invest the same level of attention in these areas. Mistral claims it can compete with the strongest open-source models globally and significantly surpass existing open-source weight models in the U.S. and Europe.

The training was completed at Mistral's proprietary data center in Europe, using 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs, with the public preview also provided by the same facility. VentureBeat reported that training started from scratch and took about two months. TechCrunch's VP of Technology Pierre Stock stated that the computing power is about one-half to one-third of that of Chinese counterparts, and significantly less than closed-source competitors. Before releasing the weights, safety tests will be conducted with the government and trusted partners, aiming for defensive use rather than malicious attacks.

The training data includes a large amount of multilingual content, covering over 160 languages, including all official EU languages. The model will be available in multiple regions globally, with European deployment operated end-to-end by Mistral, without relying on other digital service providers, and subject to European laws. The weights are expected to be licensed under Mistral's own terms, and the company has not yet disclosed the interface pricing.

In September, Mistral completed a €3 billion Series D funding round, with a post-money valuation exceeding €21 billion. Samsung Electronics led the round, with EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-leading, and participation from a16z, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Advent, and BlackRock. The Series C was led by ASML. The funds will be used for expanding computing power, building infrastructure, and accelerating commercialization.

Buyers include enterprises, security officials, and governments seeking European deployment and open-source weights, while Mistral provides the preview using its own data center. This is a model preview, not the public release of weights. Computing expenditures remain in European data centers, benefiting the chip supply chain where Samsung and ASML are located. There will still be pressure on closed-source interfaces or European institutions relying on Chinese open-source weights.

Source: Public Information