Mistral to Release New AI Model to Better Compete with U.S. Rivals

Mistral said it would soon release a new open-weight AI model that it claimed would rank among the best globally, part of efforts to grow its appeal, lock in more customers and better compete with U.S. rivals.

The French artificial-intelligence startup said it was launching a public preview of Mistral Large 4, dubbed Le Chonk, on Tuesday so it could work with developers, cybersecurity experts and state authorities to evaluate how the model behaves. It plans to release the weights, or the trained parameters of the model, on Oct. 27.

Since its early days, Mistral has been a staunch advocate of open-weight models that are publicly available for anyone to download and modify, saying they give users the flexibility to tailor them to their needs while protecting their data and intellectual property.

The company said that closed models—where developers keep the source code, training data, and underlying model weights hidden—could pose security risks for users because they sometimes block responses to useful cyberdefense requests.

A more capable model would allow Mistral to appeal to more consumers and enterprises, grow its customer base and better compete with the likes of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Anthropic. Mistral said it had trained its new model on about 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell graphics processing units deployed at its own data centers in Europe.

It said Mistral Large 4 would rank among the top open-weight models globally on aggregate benchmark performance, and the strongest open-weight model developed outside China by a substantial margin.

“The model capabilities will further improve as we scale up our training capacity,” Guillaume Lample, Mistral co-founder and chief scientist, said.

The announcement comes about a month after Mistral completed a funding round led by South Korea’s Samsung Electronics that lifted its valuation above $24 billion, giving it additional firepower to invest in model development.

News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.