Mistral’s new 1T model aims to leapfrog closed and open rivals | TechCrunch

Mistral AI has released Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk in reference to its one trillion parameters, which is at least a rare instance of a lab naming a product honestly. Emmanuel Macron has framed the effort as 'a third way in AI' — a phrase with the confident ring of a summit communiqué. The model is intended to leapfrog both American and Chinese rivals, which is a bold target in a race where those rivals keep releasing things on the same Tuesday. One trillion parameters is not a strategy; it is a number with a marketing department. Still, one admires the ambition of turning up to a knife fight holding a very large, very expensive baguette.

The interesting bit is what Mistral isn't doing. Mistral Large 4 is not yet an open-weight release, which for a company that built much of its reputation on open weights is a bit like a brewery announcing it's gone into weddings. VP Science Pierre Stock explains that the company will work with trusted partners and governments on weights that 'can be used to defend, but not to [perform] malicious attacks' — a sentence built so that defending and attacking are decided by whoever holds the weights. It is the crowbar that opens only your own windows. One assumes the trusted-partner list will be drawn up slowly, discreetly and entirely to taste.

So we get the familiar three-card trick — open enough to claim the community, closed enough to keep the customers, sovereign enough to bill the French state — with a trillion parameters as the magic word. The leapfrog remains theoretical: rivals are not sitting still waiting to be overtaken, and Le Chonk's principal competitive advantage so far is a nickname that fits on a t-shirt. Regulators will arrive around 2029 to ask what 'trusted partners' means, by which time the weights will be somewhere else entirely, wearing a different name. Third way indeed — the third way is usually where the money goes.