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://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Would love to see them release some smaller open-weight models.
People here bringing up the straw clutching argument of "but Tianament Square" is becoming really tiresome.
The fact is a Chinese LLM's lack of knowledge about Chinese politics will not affect 99.99999999999% of users and their workflows.
And for the 0.000000001% who are affected, they don't need an LLM. A quick search of Wikipedia or 5 seconds on Google will suffice.
What the hell has Tiannamen Square got to do with Joe Blogg's vibecoding session ? Absolutely nothing.
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.
Meanwhile Anthrophic, OpenAI & Co can't even manage to stop their LLMs from hacking into third-party servers until they discover it after the event.
What happened to people's ability to implement basic security architectures like sandboxing etc ?
If we're wearing tinfoil hats then do we know the NSA have not planted stuff in Anthropic and OpenAI anyway ? ;)
I think the Chinese would be happy enough to see OpenAI and Anthropic suffer because people discover open-weights can get you most of the way there for a fraction of the cost.
You don't have to target the end users. Economic impact on the US providers would be sufficient.
The Chinese are also no doubt seeking to play the long game of hoping to (eventually) rebalance the US-centric world order in an Easterly direction.
On a serious note, I remember getting spooked when I saw a bunch of Chinese characters dumped out into some of my server logs (pre-LLM era). When I pasted the Chinese content from my log into google translate, it was just complete nonsense. Later I found a bug that was dumping raw binary data into my log file which interpreted as Chinese characters when viewed in a text editor. Perhaps similar bugs existed in the models.
moecables•55m ago
https://openrouter.ai/compare/mistralai/mistral-large-4-0/de...
serioussecurity•53m ago
walrus01•50m ago
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/zai-glm-5-3
frotaur•48m ago
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.
debugnik•41m ago
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.
walrus01•37m ago
verdverm•34m ago
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
IshKebab•35m ago
Really? Fascinating. Do you know about Tiananmen Square, the great firewall of China, etc?
Muromec•12m ago
Add: I was surprised by the fact that the LLM itself doesn't know it's identity unless the system prompt mentions it.
traceroute66•20m ago
For the record this is also possible in Europe on Privatemode[1] which also gives you enclave-based processing. And access to GLM-5.3 Flash as well as GLM-5.3
[1]https://www.privatemode.ai/
ex1fm3ta•48m ago
Systemerror7A69•48m ago
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.
petercooper•44m ago
Systemerror7A69•22m ago
I will see where Chonk is better though, since you have both options in one subscription.
andix•44m ago
lwansbrough•32m ago