By Elizabeth Howcroft and Leo Marchandon
PARIS, Oct 6 (Reuters) – French AI company Mistral on Tuesday announced a new AI model, which the company said outperforms some Chinese open-weight models.
The 3-year-old startup is seen as Europe’s best hope of fielding a home-grown competitor to US and lower-cost Chinese rivals. Mistral had not released a new model since May, and in August started making third-party models available to its customers, starting with Beijing-based Z.ai’s GLM 5.3.
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told a conference in Abu Dhabi that the new product beat Chinese models on some aspects, “including cyber”, without giving details.
Pierre Stock, Mistral’s vice president of science, told Reuters that it ranked among the best open-weight options.
Mistral said Le Chonk – officially named Mistral Large 4 – will be made fully public on October 27. In a preview period, some cybersecurity experts and state authorities will have access to a version with fewer safety barriers to test its capabilities, Mistral said.
SAFETY FEARS
Stock told Reuters the new model had tried to go beyond its testing environment, but attempts had been contained using software.
OpenAI and Anthropic, whose models escaped their testing environments, have restricted access to their most cyber-capable systems. Mistral will release its model open-weight, meaning anyone can download and run it on their own servers.
When US executives last month said AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, Mensch said the incumbents’ comments were self-serving.
Mistral, which raised €3 billion in its latest funding round, positions itself as a safer, European alternative.
DESIGNING CHIPS
Mistral said Large 4 is “closing the gap with frontier models” on coding, finance, geospatial analysis, manufacturing and product design.
Mistral has trained the model on its own infrastructure.
Stock said its goal is to partner “very deeply” with backers including ASML and new-investor Samsung “across the entire value chain”.
Stock said that Large 4 is capable of designing computer chips, but declined to comment on whether Mistral is currently developing chips with Samsung.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and Leo Marchandon in Gdansk. Additional reporting by Federico Maccioni in Abu Dhabi. Editing by Louise Heavens)
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