Mistral has released Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion-parameter open-weight model nicknamed "Le Chonk," currently in preview with a final version expected by month's end. The model is freely available for use and customization, targeting general-purpose tasks while being specifically optimized for coding, cyberdefense, manufacturing, finance, and electrical engineering. Mistral claims Le Chonk is the most capable open-weight model developed outside China and performs "very, very close" to leading proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike Chinese labs accused of using distillation to close performance gaps, Mistral asserts it trained Le Chonk from scratch. The company argues that open-weight models reduce costs to compute expenses alone, eliminating remaining hesitations for businesses to adopt open source. Despite having less capital and compute than US rivals, Mistral has gained momentum: in September it secured a $3.3 billion funding round at a $24 billion valuation—the largest ever for a European tech company—and earnings have reportedly grown 20-fold over the past year. Mistral monetizes through pay-as-you-go cloud inference fees and engineering services for model tuning, positioning Le Chonk as a competitive alternative to both proprietary US models and Chinese open-weight releases.