What to know about Mistral's ML4 as it bets on EU sovereignty in the US-China open-weight AI race
Known as “Le Chonk,” the new frontier AI offering from French company Mistral says it will be the strongest open-weight AI outside China, as it bets that European "sovereignty" can win customers in a race increasingly framed as US versus China.
Mistral AI, a French artificial intelligence company, unveiled a new open-weight frontier model, ML4, dubbed "Le Chonk," on Tuesday. The model aims to become the most capable open-weight model outside China once its weights are released. This launch is significant as the race for open-weight AI has taken on a geopolitical dimension, with Chinese developers leading the way while American companies like OpenAI maintain closed systems.
Mistral's ML4 is designed with strong defense capabilities, focusing on cybersecurity and defense, and is expected to attract customers seeking a European alternative built around sovereignty.
Guillaume Lample, Mistral's chief scientist and co-founder, described ML4 as a new generation of models during a press conference. The model emphasizes cyber defense capabilities, which Mistral claims are superior to those of its Chinese competitors. This comes just a day after US startup Reflection unveiled Beam, another open-weight model, as a Western counterweight to Chinese open models.
Mistral's ML4 was trained on 4,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in European data centers over two months. The model supports over 160 languages, including all official EU languages, and works across Latin and non-Latin scripts. ML4 is now available through Mistral's API on Mistral Studio, with the model weights set to be released on October 27.
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