The race between open and closed AI is on, and Europe is still in the mix. On Tuesday, French AI lab Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4 (ML4), a large multimodal model with one trillion parameters, nicknamed Le Chonk. Mistral positions ML4 as an alternative to both closed models that can be unplugged and open models that are often made in China, following French President Emmanuel Macron’s description of a “third way in AI.” The model is not open-weight yet: it is currently accessible only via a public guardrail endpoint, and Mistral plans to make the weights available in three weeks, after safety testing is complete. Pierre Stock, Mistral’s VP of Science, told TechCrunch that in the meantime the company will work with trusted partners and governments to make sure the open-source weights can be used to defend, but not to perform malicious attacks.

Stock noted that security concerns have been mounting, particularly among Mistral’s core audience of enterprises and institutions, but that an open-weight model is easier to audit. Another key detail is training efficiency: ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral’s own compute using only 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which Stock said is two to three times less than Chinese competitors and significantly less than closed-source competitors. Benchmark results are still pending, but Mistral hopes ML4 will be best in class among open-weight models, especially outside China. Thanks to focused training, it could also outperform closed models in specific areas that are important to its customers, where multimodal capabilities add value. Stock cited cybersecurity, finance, and chip design as optimized use cases.

Chip design 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). The company also used the release to counter the impression that hosting Chinese models meant a pivot to becoming a mere inference provider. With Le Chonk, Mistral believes it should still be considered a frontier lab.