Large 4 launch

Mistral released Mistral Large 4 (ML4), nicknamed 'Le Chonk', on Tuesday 6 October. The multimodal model analyses text and images and has 1 trillion parameters, according to Le Parisien and Corriere della Sera. It was trained for two months in Mistral's European data centres on more than 160 languages, using 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips. Mistral is releasing it as an open-weight model, so its parameters and architecture will be made public, with the weights due on 27 October. The model is already available through Mistral's API, Corriere della Sera reported.

Speaking on France Inter, Arthur Mensch said the model marks a technological leap and can run for hours on autonomous tasks, something earlier models could not do. He said Mistral trained it with about 2% of the resources some competitors use, and that it performs better than Chinese models on several benchmarks.

It is a technological leap, in the sense that we trained it on far more computing capacity.

— Arthur Mensch
Mistral Large 4 timeline, October 2026
  1. Guillaume Lample offers Ecosia early access to Large 4 at a Monday press conference
  2. Mistral unveils Mistral Large 4 (ML4), nicknamed Le Chonk
  3. Arthur Mensch tells France Inter Mistral is a few months from catching US rivals
  4. Ecosia says it will end its use of Mistral models, according to Politico
  5. Scheduled publication of Large 4 weights

Catch-up claim

Mensch told France Inter that Mistral is 'a few months' from matching the American giants, in mathematics in particular. He expects Mistral to become much better at mathematics in the coming months, pointing to the three billion euro fundraising announced in September. He said the model's agentic capabilities let it work on mathematical problems effectively. Franceinfo noted that OpenAI has published nearly 400 new mathematical results on complex problems in a few weeks. Asked whether AI could lead to the destruction of humanity, Mensch dismissed the question as meaningless. On the need for Europe to build its own capacity, he said:

If we do not produce this technology, we will have to import it.

— Arthur Mensch

Ecosia drops Mistral

Ecosia, the German search engine and browser, is ending its partnership with Mistral AI, founder Christian Kroll told Politico. Ecosia had dropped OpenAI in May 2026 and chose Mistral, and it is now switching to Chinese models. Kroll said the company was disappointed with the quality of the models and believes Mistral is a year behind US and Chinese competitors. He said Ecosia had become too big a customer for Mistral to serve:

We were simply too big a customer for Mistral.

— Christian Kroll

Kroll also questioned Mistral's environmental choices, pointing to France's energy mix, which relies heavily on nuclear power, and doubted that Mistral's international investors make it sovereign. Mensch replied on X that he was sorry nuclear power was a real obstacle. Mistral had not commented to Politico at the time of publication. Guillaume Lample, Mistral's chief scientist, had offered Ecosia early access to Large 4 at a press conference on Monday and urged it to test the model as soon as possible.