French AI lab Mistral AI has released Mistral Large 4, a new large multimodal model aiming to leapfrog both American and Chinese rivals. The release follows what French president Macron has described as "a third way in AI."
Nicknamed Le Chonk in reference to its one trillion parameters, ML4 is not an open-weight model yet. For the time being, it can only be accessed via a public guardrail endpoint, but Mistral plans to make its weights available in just three weeks, after safety testing is complete.
"In the meantime, we'll work with trusted partners and governments to make sure that the open-source weights can be used to defend, but not to [perform] malicious attacks," Mistral VP Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch.
Stock said ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral's compute, using only 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which he said is two to three times less than the company's Chinese competitors and significantly less than closed source competitors. Benchmark results are still pending.
According to Stock, ML4's optimised use cases include cybersecurity and finance, but also chip design, which is core to two of Mistral's main backers — Dutch giant ASML, which led its Series C, and Samsung, which led its Series D last month at a €21 billion valuation (about $24.39 billion).