European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk'

Another week brings yet another open weights model and this one is huge — or at least it is for Europe's AI flag bearer Mistral, which has taken to calling the 1 trillion-parameter large language model (LLM) Le Chonk. Its product name is Mistral Large 4, which is a lot less fun than the cat-meme-inspired "very official" moniker Le Chonk. Nonetheless, the LLM is the French model-dev's biggest open weights release ever. At a trillion parameters, Le Chonk is squarely in frontier territory, and like most modern frontier models, it is multimodal, reasoning, and employs a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture with about 49 billion active parameters to keep serving costs low. Mistral didn't offer any guidance on hardware requirements in its release blog, but the model is still small enough to run reasonably on 8-way GPU boxes like Nvidia's HGX B300 or AMD's MI355X. We know far more about the hardware the model was trained on. …