Seems like it's multimodal and visual intelligence capabilities are better than Deepseek 4.1 Flash, even though coding is not equal to DS 4.1 1017. The cost is about 10x of Deepseek though comparing on OpenRouter.
It's gonna be interesting to see the final version, since this is a preview model still. I'm not completely sure as to how this works, but from what I gathered it will be further trained during this period, so it might improve a bit.
Since cost is so much higher than deepseek though it really seems like the biggest reason to use it would be "in the mistral subscription" for personal use or "because you need to abide by european data privacy laws" for companies.
Mostly I'm happy they're still in competition, as I mentioned already elsewhere.
The weird thing about this model is that it spits out Chinese characters just like the chinese models when chatting with it in German. Happened to me quite often during the past few days.
Well, Models are hard to just distill down to a single benchmark number, or even a few across multiple different benchmark - they all behave and work slightly differently and you can find some who work or feel better for you and your use-case specifically.
But you're right, Mistral Large 4 seems a much more expensive but overall weaker model across the board.
The reason to use them would be, well, because they're...Mistral. They're in EU, france is large in nuclear energy so the energy cost of training has much less of an environmental impact, the data protection laws are very good in EU. This can really be a deciding factor for many EU companies, and I think it's good that they now have something which is at least semi-usable. (apparently)
It's also good that other options exist, even if they are worse. Deepseek is kind of like a large specter looming over every model release, because it's just SO cheap and good. That doesn't mean we should abandon every other model.
Still, the model is not really competitive on price and abilities alone. I'm mostly happy to see Mistral still in the fight.
I say this with a slight tongue in cheek, but Mistral does have a better option: they recently added GLM 5.3 to their platform (and it works rather well). Not trained in the EU, though, of course ;-)
Interestingly Mistral has been selling GLM5.3 inference hosted in Europe on their own hardware, for those who are OK using a "not developed in Europe" model but run on hardware located in and controlled by a European corporation.
Indeed, I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.
You could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model (that has been demonstrated to be possible in toy examples), but I would highly doubt that this would be the case today, given the potential reputational damage if discovered.
Remember Stuxnet? An american worm that was completely benign, travelled on usb drives in hiding, and only activated when it guessed that it's on Iranian plants, and iirc changed very subtly some very specific parameters of operations.
Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.
I recall seeing something about that. I don't know of anyone still using such an ancient model when much newer Qwen 3.5-120, 3.6-35B-A3B, 3.8-27B and 3.8-flash-next all exist and score much higher on all conceivable metrics. I would like to see if anyone can replicate the same thing on a 'current' Qwen released in the past 6 months.
Seems like it's multimodal and visual intelligence capabilities are better than Deepseek 4.1 Flash, even though coding is not equal to DS 4.1 1017. The cost is about 10x of Deepseek though comparing on OpenRouter.
Weights will be here https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B at the end of the month.
Since cost is so much higher than deepseek though it really seems like the biggest reason to use it would be "in the mistral subscription" for personal use or "because you need to abide by european data privacy laws" for companies.
Mostly I'm happy they're still in competition, as I mentioned already elsewhere.
https://openrouter.ai/compare/mistralai/mistral-large-4-0/de...
But you're right, Mistral Large 4 seems a much more expensive but overall weaker model across the board.
The reason to use them would be, well, because they're...Mistral. They're in EU, france is large in nuclear energy so the energy cost of training has much less of an environmental impact, the data protection laws are very good in EU. This can really be a deciding factor for many EU companies, and I think it's good that they now have something which is at least semi-usable. (apparently)
It's also good that other options exist, even if they are worse. Deepseek is kind of like a large specter looming over every model release, because it's just SO cheap and good. That doesn't mean we should abandon every other model.
Still, the model is not really competitive on price and abilities alone. I'm mostly happy to see Mistral still in the fight.
I will see where Chonk is better though, since you have both options in one subscription.
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/zai-glm-5-3
You could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model (that has been demonstrated to be possible in toy examples), but I would highly doubt that this would be the case today, given the potential reputational damage if discovered.
Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.
Ok I see it's flagged now, probably fake, but the fact that it's possible does make me feel uneasy about both Chinese and US models.
That's my read anyhow. It's been flagged. The whole thing is kind of rich, considering the Israeli roots of the company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179706
Really? Fascinating. Do you know about Tiananmen Square, the great firewall of China, etc?
Would love to see them release some smaller open-weight models.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...