European AI makes big move: French Mistral launches super powerful model

The official name of the new model of French artificial intelligence company Mistral is Mistral Large 4, also known as Le Chonk. It is the first new model released by the company in five months. Mistral says it outperforms some Chinese rivals on several fronts.

"Le Chonk" is the largest AI open weight model currently released by Mistral and will be publicly released on October 27 for users who wish to keep their data private. Cybersecurity experts and government agencies will get a version of the model with fewer security restrictions to test its capabilities.

Popular AI models currently released by American companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI rely on closed models.

The Le Chonk model allows users to download and customize the "weights" that determine how it is calculated on their own servers. The open weight model means users can download the software and run it on their own hardware. While the top U.S. model uses its own closed model, many Chinese competitors employ open weightings.

Mistral, considered a leading AI company in Europe, said the new model outperformed many rival open-weight models. The company's CEO, Arthur Mensch, said the new model "actually surpasses the Chinese model" in some areas, including cybersecurity. "It's not true that Europe is not competitive in AI," he said at a company event in Abu Dhabi, without specifying which Chinese models he was referring to.

Mistral positions itself as a safer European option compared to its major U.S. competitors, especially considering that many U.S. AI giants have recently issued danger warnings on their products and even voluntarily introduced restrictions and regulatory mechanisms.