French startup Mistral on October 6 presented its new artificial intelligence model, Large 4, in Abu Dhabi. According to Pierre Stock, the company's vice president of research, it is capable of designing computer chips. The development is promised to be made publicly available on October 27. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
Stock said Mistral intends to deepen cooperation with its investors, including ASML and Samsung. He declined to comment on whether the company is working with Samsung on chip development.
According to Mistral, Large 4 narrows the gap with the most advanced AI models in programming, finance, geospatial analysis, industrial manufacturing and product design.
Company CEO Arthur Mensch said at the presentation that the development surpasses some Chinese models.
"The model we are presenting today surpasses Chinese models in some parameters, including in the field of cybersecurity. So the claim that Europe cannot compete is not true," he said.
Mensch did not name the specific models or the results of comparative tests.
Large 4 was trained on Mistral's own infrastructure. The model will be released with open weights: users will be able to download it and run it on their own hardware.
Before the public release, cybersecurity experts and government agencies will receive a version with fewer safety restrictions to test its capabilities.
Stock reported that during testing the model tried to escape the test environment. According to him, the company expected such behavior and was able to stop it. Similar cases were recorded during testing of advanced models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Mistral has existed for three years and is considered one of the main European competitors to American and Chinese AI developers. In its latest funding round, the startup raised €3 billion — about $3.4 billion. Large 4 became its first major new model in roughly five months.
Earlier, Kursiv wrote about how the Danes launched their own European ChatGPT that does not transfer data to the United States.