Mistral unveils Large 4 AI model, claims edge over Chinese rivals

Mistral AI has a new flagship. Its name is Mistral Large 4, and its nickname, officially, is “Le Chonk.” The French company unveiled the model on October 6, 2026, pitching it as the strongest open-weight AI system built outside China. Mistral also says it outperforms some Chinese rivals. Anyone can judge that claim once the weights go public on October 27. What Mistral actually built Mistral Large 4, or ML4, carries 1 trillion parameters. Only 49 billion of them are active at any given moment. That gap comes from the model’s design. ML4 is a Mixture-of-Experts system, or MoE. Picture a hospital rather than a single general practitioner. When a patient walks in, they get routed to the right specialists instead of every doctor in the building. An MoE model works the same way, sending each request to a small subset of its internal “experts” rather than firing up the whole network. ML4 is also natively multimodal. It was built from the ground up to handle more than plain text, rather than having image capabilities bolted on later. Training took approximately two months. Mistral used about 4,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs housed in its own European data centers. The benchmark claims, r...