The race between open and closed AI is on, and Europe is still in the mix - or at least still shouting encouragement from the sidelines with a baguette in hand. On Tuesday, French AI lab Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4, a new large multimodal model aiming to leapfrog both American and Chinese rivals, following what French president Macron has described as "a third way in AI." Because nothing says "third way" like a one-trillion-parameter model that isn't quite open yet.

Amid a growing divide between closed models that can be unplugged and open models that are often made in China, Mistral is positioning ML4 as an alternative to both. Nicknamed Le Chonk in reference to its one trillion parameters, ML4 is definitely not small - the name is doing a lot of honest work here. But it is not an open-weight model yet. For the time being, it can only be accessed via a public guardrail endpoint, but Mistral plans to make its weights available in just three weeks, after safety testing is complete. So mark your calendars, open-source enthusiasts.

"In the meantime, we'll work with trusted partners and governments to make sure that the open-source weights can be used to defend, but not to [perform] malicious attacks," Mistral VP Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch. A noble goal, and one that has never once gone sideways in the history of open-source software.

Security concerns have been mounting in recent months, particularly among Mistral's core audience - enterprises and institutions. At the same time, an open-weight model is easier to audit, Stock said. Which is the AI equivalent of saying "sure, the door is unlocked, but at least you can see who's coming in."

Another important behind-the-scenes aspect is that ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral's compute, using only 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs - "which is two to three times less than our Chinese competitors, and significantly less than the closed source competitors," Stock said. That's the AI version of humble-bragging about your fuel efficiency while driving a monster truck.

With benchmark results still pending, Mistral hopes ML4 will be best in class among open-weight models, especially outside of China, but not only, Stock said. Thanks to focused training, it could also outperform closed models in specific areas that are key to its customers, and where multimodal capabilities can add value. In other words: it might not win every race, but it's gunning for the ones that come with a paycheck.

According to Stock, ML4's optimized use cases include cybersecurity and finance, but also chip design, which is core to two of Mistral's main backers - Dutch giant ASML, which led its Series C, and Samsung, which led its Series D last month at a €21 billion valuation (about $24.39 billion). Nothing says "independent European AI" like being bankrolled by the companies that make the machines that make the chips.

At the time, the company tried to convey that its decision to host Chinese models wasn't a pivot into becoming a mere inference provider. With Le Chonk in its corner, the company believes it should still be considered a frontier lab as well. And who are we to argue with a trillion-parameter chonk?