{
  "id": 12457294,
  "title": "European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk'",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/european-ai-flag-bearer-mistrals-new-open-weights-model-is-le-chonk-12457294",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-06T18:03:25.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/06/european-ai-flag-bearer-mistrals-new-open-weights-model-is-le-chonk/5301443"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Mistral, Europe's AI leader, has unveiled its latest open weights model, dubbed \"Le Chonk,\" a 1 trillion-parameter large language model (LLM). The French company has christened the model Mistral Large 4, which is bound to generate much interest. Standing in the frontier territory of AI, Le Chonk is multimodal, reasoning, and utilizes a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. While the model's hardware requirements aren't specified, it's anticipated to run efficiently on 8-way GPU boxes like Nvidia's HGX B300 or AMD's MI355X.\n\nFor training, Mistral used around 3,800 Grace Blackwell GPUs - approximately 52 NVL72 racks - in their European datacenters. This model, trained on a corpus spanning 160 languages, combines supervised pre-training and reinforcement learning. Le Chonk is currently in preview, with its weights expected to become available on Hugging Face and other model repositories within a month.\n\nEarly independent testing shows Le Chonk trailing behind top AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, it surpasses the most capable open weights model, Thinking Machines Lab's Inkling, from the United States. In terms of non-Chinese LLMs available for download, Mistral holds its own quite well. Their self-benchmarks, though, paint a rosier picture across various domains, including coding, agentic, finance, legal, and cybersecurity tasks.\n\nMistral is particularly proud of Le Chonk's strong performance in cybersecurity workloads, which they use to counteract proprietary American AI models with such restrictions. Their €3 billion Series D funding round last month aims to propel Mistral into developing more advanced models, with the expectation of performance improvements in future iterations of Le Chonk. The model is currently accessible via Mistral's API.",
  "summary": "Oh lawd it is coming ... to Hugging Face later this month",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 5,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "TechCrunch",
        "title": "Mistral’s new 1T model aims to leapfrog closed and open rivals",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/mistrals-new-1t-model-aims-to-leapfrog-closed-and-open-rivals",
        "published": "2026-10-06T14:33:16.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Slashdot",
        "title": "Mistral Unveils New 'Le Chonk' AI Model It Says Rivals Best Open Systems From China",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/mistral-unveils-new-le-chonk-ai-model-it-says-rivals-best-open",
        "published": "2026-10-06T17:00:00.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "The Register Science",
        "title": "European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk'",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/european-ai-flag-bearer-mistrals-new-open-weights-model-is-le-chonk",
        "published": "2026-10-06T18:03:25.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Techmeme",
        "title": "Artificial Analysis says Mistral Large 4 is the most intelligent model from outside the US and China, achieving results comparable to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) (Artificial Analysis)",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/06/artificial-analysis-says-mistral-large-4-is-the-most-intelligent",
        "published": "2026-10-06T20:50:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}