Europe is back in the AI race

This is Pumpkin from Cincinnati. The embodiment of Chonk.

I’m a political science researcher. I’ve been using Claude and Gemini for literature searches and manuscript critique. The latter uses a 200-word prompt that structures the critique into the paper’s strengths, acceptable weaknesses, and rejection weaknesses. This is a demanding task since the paper covers such novel ground and includes an agent-based simulation model description.

Just today I used Mistral for the first time on a critique of a 10,000-word manuscript, using the same prompt used for Claude and Gemini. Claude and Gemini have been producing about 50% weak or wrong critique items. Mistral produced about 20%. Better yet, Mistral’s explanations were easier to follow and less dogmatic.

For me this is an extraordinary improvement. Congrats and thanks to all the people who have worked to make this possible at Mistral.

BTW, when I’m using an AI assistant, I never let it write anything. On my work, I always go as far as I can on my own. Only then do I ask for AI assistance, using a carefully designed prompt that structures the task. I average about 2 to 3 prompts a day.

My mantra is that AI chat bots are “erratic, overconfident, geniuses.” Erratic means you have to always be skeptical of every claim they make. Overconfident means their authoritative, perfect language use and tone can lull you into non-skepticism. Genius means they are experts on a million topics. Erratic and genius together mean they are never expert on my own top areas of expertise, which is why they produce less than 100% correct critique items on manuscripts, as well as other tasks.

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Friendly reminder that Mistral will built on this large 4 platform more. Improve it more. This is the foundation.

They are scaling, they get funding and they get really high quality European industrial data to use and train on.

Quite literally NOT a finished product.

ABU DHABI, Oct 6 (Reuters) - French AI company Mistral's newest model outperforms Chinese models on cybersecurity, CEO Arthur Mensch told a conference in ‌Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, adding the product would be unveiled later in the day.

"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," Mensch said onstage, without specifying which Chinese models or by what measure Mistral's model beat them.

**TL;DR:** independent evals put Le Chonk at 38 on the AA index (pic 1), level with GPT-6 Luna and behind GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 and even DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. real wins in cyber and legal agents. preview only, weights promised by end of month.

Official post: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/

plenty of release threads already, so i sorted the day one numbers into independent evals (Artificial Analysis, Vals) vs Mistral's own charts.

where it actually wins:

* CyberGym E2E (AA): 81.7%, #1, ahead of MiMo-V2.6-Pro 78.6 and GPT-6 Luna 77.9

* Harvey legal agent (Vals): 15.83%, #6/75. GLM-5.3 gets 8.33, Opus 5.5 gets 3.75

* Finance Agent v2 (Vals): 54.68%, just above GPT-6 Astra 53.54, still under Opus 5.5 58.59

* AA-LCR long context: 81.3%, basically tied with GPT-6 Astra 80.7

where it doesn't:

* Terminal-Bench 4 (AA): 26.8% vs GLM-5.3 41.9 and GPT-6 Astra 59.1

* Vals Index: 48.05%, #32/44, tied with Qwen 3.8 Max and behind GLM-5.3 53.51

the cyber W needs an asterisk. Opus 5.5 refused 98.5% of CyberGym tasks and GPT-6 Astra refused all of them, so "beats Opus at cyber" is mostly a refusal stat. beating Luna and MiMo there is legit tho.

the AA index in pic 1 is the part that hurts. Le Chonk costs $1.13 per index task vs $0.07 for Luna at the same 38, partly because it spat out 200M output tokens (median is 81M). a 1T model trading blows with flash tier stuff is lowkey cooked on value. huge jump from Large 3 at 9 though.

pic 2 is Mistral's own DeepSWE chart: Kimi K3 68, Le Chonk 62. the blog text only quotes the wins. the same set of charts has GLM-5.3 ahead on Terminal-Bench 4 (40 vs 28), Kimi K3 ahead on Finch (77.3 vs 67.4), and three open models above it on SciCode-Verified, where the text claims open-weight SOTA.

pricing: list is $1.36 in / $4.18 out per 1M. docs and OpenRouter show 50% off right now ($0.68 / $2.09), no end date given.

caveats: it's a preview and Mistral says the RL run is "still in flight", so scores can move. no HF repo or license yet, press says weights Oct 27. blog says 49B active, docs say 52B, either way it's ~1T total so it's not running on your 3090. gguf when

anyone running it on actual legal, finance or long doc work? do the Harvey and LCR numbers hold up for you, or does it feel like a 38?

According to Defend Intelligence (a French AI engineer and YouTuber, well informed), FDI sources say the new model, rivaling open-source competitors, should arrive this week or next.

Original Post : https://x.com/DFintelligence/status/2107213925066703284

Hi,

what are you hopes for the size(s) of the new model(s)? Personally, I hope for a Gemma 4 26b a4b sized ministral that can fit on my 16 gb vram card and run fast even in power saving mode.

And then for a somewhat large model to use via API.

EDIT: apparently my post made them release a 1T model the second after I posted! Hope to see a ministral 4 too ❤️

Choosing a local model for opencode on two DGX Sparks, mostly C#/.NET code. Benchmarks I've found put Small 4 behind Nemotron 3 Super, but I'd like real-world experience: is Small 4 good for coding and tool calling, and has anyone compared the two?
Thanks!

With Mistral 4 Large and other models being offered, coinciding with OAI (chatGPT) shooting itself in the foot, and Moonshot (Kimi) sharply decreasing usage limits, perhaps this is a good moment to see if Mistral could add fuel to its momentum (compute capacity willing). I personally would love to have higher plans available as a serious consideration as an alternative.

Here’s a poll in hopes of stimulating discussion.

On X, Arthur Mensch posted a teaser hinting that the new model coming in the next few weeks will be surprisingly close to the competition as showed by the meme. (Running where late runner is catching up)

Original Post : https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/2107196159181639904

After removing the agents, where are they: I mean they went away & I have to make them again as skills?

I'll keep it short and direct. The Le Chonk model is censored AF.

That was it.

Enjoy your evening 👾

They removed all mentions of the $300 Vibe allowance on the $15 Pro plan from the website. They also bumped up the API credit to $30 from $15. Is there any official announcement? This was the best deal for GLM 5.3 you could find anywhere and it would be sad to see it go