The competition between open and closed AI systems continues to intensify, and Europe remains a key player in this arena. French AI company Mistral AI unveiled Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday—a new large multimodal model designed to surpass both American and Chinese competitors. This launch aligns with what French President Macron has called "a third way in AI."

As the gap widens between closed models that can be shut down and open models frequently developed in China, Mistral positions ML4 as a distinct alternative to both approaches. The model, nicknamed Le Chonk in reference to its one trillion parameters, is certainly not small—yet it is not yet an open-weight model. Currently, access is limited to a public guardrail endpoint, though Mistral intends to release its weights within three weeks, once safety testing concludes. Security concerns have been escalating recently, especially among Mistral's primary audience of enterprises and institutions. At the same time, open-weight models are easier to audit, according to Stock.

Another significant behind-the-scenes detail is that ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral's own compute infrastructure, utilizing only 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Stock noted this is "two to three times less than our Chinese competitors, and significantly less than the closed source competitors." While benchmark results are still pending, Mistral hopes ML4 will achieve best-in-class status among open-weight models, particularly outside of China—though not exclusively, Stock said. Thanks to its focused training approach, the model could also surpass closed models in specific areas critical to its customers, where multimodal capabilities provide added value.

According to Stock, ML4's optimized use cases span cybersecurity and finance, as well as chip design—a field central to two of Mistral's major backers: Dutch giant ASML, which led its Series C round, and Samsung, which led its Series D last month at a €21 billion valuation (approximately $24.39 billion). At that time, the company sought to clarify that its decision to host Chinese models did not represent a pivot toward becoming merely an inference provider. With Le Chonk now in its arsenal, Mistral believes it should still be regarded as a frontier lab.