France's Mistral launches AI model it says outperforms some Chinese rivals

By Elizabeth Howcroft and Leo Marchandon

PARIS, Oct 6 (Reuters) - French AI startup Mistral unveiled a new AI model on Tuesday, ending a gap of about five months between major releases, and said it outperforms many rival open-weight models.

The three-year-old company, widely viewed as Europe's strongest AI challenger to US and Chinese competitors, has not released a new model since May. In August, it began offering third-party models to customers, starting with Beijing-based Z.ai's GLM 5.3.

"The model we're actually announcing today is actually above the Chinese models on certain aspects, including cyber. So the narrative that Europe cannot compete is something that is not true," CEO Artur Mensch said at a launch event in Abu Dhabi, without specifying which Chinese models or benchmarks he was referring to.

Mistral said Le Chonk, officially named Mistral Large 4, will be made publicly available on October 27. 

Before the release, cybersecurity experts and government authorities will be given access to a version with fewer safety restrictions to test its capabilities, the company said.

Pierre Stock, Mistral's vice president of science, told Reuters that the model ranks among the strongest open-weight, systems available.

Open-weight means users can download the model from platforms and run it on their own hardware. Many Chinese models are open-weight, while top US models tend to be closed and accessible only through their developers' infrastructure.

SAFETY RISKS CONTAINED

Stock told Reuters the model had tried to go beyond its testing environment, but that this was expected and the company was able to prevent it.

OpenAI and Anthropic, whose most advanced models have demonstrated similar behaviour in testing, have restricted access to their most cyber-capable systems.

After executives at US AI companies warned last month that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, Mensch dismissed such arguments as self-serving.

Mistral, which raised €3 billion ($3.4 billion) in its latest funding round, has positioned itself as a safer, European alternative.

'CLOSING THE GAP'

Mistral said Large 4 is "closing the gap with frontier models" in areas including coding, finance, geospatial analysis, manufacturing and product design.

The company trained the model on its own infrastructure.

Stock said Mistral's goal was to partner "very deeply" with backers including ASML and new-investor Samsung "across the entire value chain".

He said Large 4 is capable of designing computer chips, but declined to comment on whether Mistral is currently working with Samsung on chip development.

($1 = 0.8883 euros)

(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and Leo Marchandon in Gdansk. Additional reporting by Federico Maccioni in Abu Dhabi. Editing by Louise Heavens and Mark Potter)