We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
Posted by kuberwastaken 3 hours ago
Comments
Comment by maxloh 2 hours ago
Calling this "open weight" is misleading. That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
[0]: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/blo...
Comment by hintymad 17 minutes ago
Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.
[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.
Comment by formerly_proven 3 minutes ago
Comment by fuddle 1 hour ago
https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition
Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.
Comment by madeofpalk 14 minutes ago
Comment by maxloh 1 hour ago
No major Chinese or Western labs satisfy these requirements. The only vendors I can think of that do are Nvidia and Allen AI.
Comment by biggestriverman 1 hour ago
Comment by InsideOutSanta 48 minutes ago
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Comment by vulture916 20 minutes ago
Comment by maxloh 2 hours ago
Open models we have now will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.
I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.
Comment by lisplist 1 hour ago
Comment by wolttam 2 hours ago
The fear you're sharing has been shared since day 1 of open-weight models and it has yet to come to fruition.
Further, regardless of what any of these labs license their model as, the end user who has downloaded the weights can still use them for virtually any purpose (synthetic data, classification, etc) as much as they want and there is no way to reasonably enforce a license on those outputs.
So even if you can't run a service using this model's weights (without a license), the weights still do provide utility for training new models with any other license.
*Edit, responding to the replies: Constraints give rise to ingenuity. Who knows how we'll be training models in the future. Hopefully in a distributed fashion, maybe with some kind of consensus-driven training dataset selection. Crowd funding, etc. There's too many people that want this, and the knowledge on how to do it is out there (many times by now)
Comment by crimsoneer 2 hours ago
It's only happening now because labs have bucket tons of VC cash to burn and need a big public flex to raise more cash, or because they're subsidised by the Chinese government. I'm not massively confident either of those will stay true forever.
Comment by joelthelion 46 minutes ago
Comment by crimsoneer 17 minutes ago
Comment by poszlem 1 hour ago
Comment by wraptile 1 hour ago
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Comment by sigmar 1 hour ago
Comment by p_l 1 hour ago
Comment by athrowaway3z 39 minutes ago
However, there is a more straightforward solution. The allows general use inside a company. The license blocks the "Model-as-a-Service".
So instead, any GPU holder can provide a 'Infrastructure-as-a-service' and have clients provide the model, and then tell the clients that as an optimization they can also provide just the hash and they'll load it from their memory.
I think its good that this license pushes the ecosystem towards such a generic-utility framework, but as a moat to protect a business its banking on most companies being lazy and wasteful.
That pays off more than people like to admit.
Comment by matt3210 54 minutes ago
Put a JEV on the output to filter out responses that might show its Mistral
Theft is the AI way
Comment by doctorpangloss 47 minutes ago
Comment by alberth 13 minutes ago
Comment by 3abiton 1 hour ago
Comment by abdullahkhalids 43 minutes ago
For example, you can record yourself playing different instruments, singing, and making other sounds. Then you can go combine all these recordings into a song, and you release the song under a CC license. The CC licenses framework does not demand that you also release the component recordings. But the released song can be remixed by someone else.
(Not making a value judgement, just making an equivalence).
Comment by pdpi 59 minutes ago
Comment by Izmaki 49 minutes ago
HashiCorp has the same business model for their products: you are free to use them even in a business, except if your business is a competitor of their own cloud solutions.
Comment by clhodapp 46 minutes ago
Comment by antoniojtorres 16 minutes ago
Comment by slopmaxxing 45 minutes ago
Comment by ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago
Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?
Comment by maxloh 2 hours ago
Correct me if I am wrong.
Comment by crimsoneer 2 hours ago
Comment by ShinyLeftPad 1 hour ago
Latest versions of Kimi, Qwen, GLM aren't open, you need to pay them for commercial stuff and comply with PRC laws
Comment by crimsoneer 1 hour ago
Comment by terabyterex 1 hour ago
Comment by Rapzid 1 hour ago
People need to make money.
This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.
Comment by FooBarWidget 1 hour ago
I got super angry reactions.
Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.
Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.
Comment by ekianjo 1 hour ago
Comment by vrganj 2 hours ago
Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc
Comment by whatisthiseven 2 hours ago
As the training data is every written thing they can get their hands on, right?
And wouldn't making that "open source" violate every license that the original data has? You can't release someone else's work.
Unless I have a misunderstanding?
Comment by simias 1 hour ago
The only way to make sure that a model was trained without hiding weird biases and backdoors is to monitor this process. It also allows anybody (with the hardware resources) to experiment with the model and how it's trained. Will most people want to do that? No, but most people also don't want to recompile their own kernel, that doesn't negate the value of Linux being FOSS.
I hope that, in the long term, I'll be able to use competitive, completely open models in the same way that I can run Linux on my computer.
You're completely right that the licensing of the training data is a big issue though (and I would argue that it should be a much bigger issue right now, even for closed models). I hope that eventually our understanding of the tech will let us build competitive LLMs using purely public domain/Creative Commons-style training data.
I realize that we have a long way to go... but that's a very worthwhile goal IMO.
Comment by NewJazz 1 hour ago
Comment by Tepix 1 hour ago
Comment by brainwad 1 hour ago
Comment by Dylan16807 15 minutes ago
Comment by birdsongs 2 hours ago
Tangent, and not the person you're replying to, but you just independently re-discovered why so many of us despise the AI companies.
Because that's what they are already doing. Selling a repackaged form of the stolen work of all of humanity, without credit or payment.
Comment by mirekrusin 2 hours ago
Comment by Muromec 2 hours ago
Comment by mirekrusin 2 hours ago
For example there are more than 100k modified weights on hugging face.
Comment by Wheen 1 hour ago
As a result, in practice, the only example I can think of is cracks for pirated software.
Comment by Muromec 1 hour ago
Comment by mirekrusin 24 minutes ago
Comment by teiferer 2 hours ago
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
Comment by NegativeLatency 2 hours ago
Comment by bayindirh 2 hours ago
Comment by losvedir 2 hours ago
Comment by simias 1 hour ago
If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.
Comment by Muromec 2 hours ago
Comment by mirekrusin 1 hour ago
Comment by Muromec 1 hour ago
You can also just open gdb and patch the process on the fly when you need to do things.
At the end of the day there isn't much hard difference between source code and binary code. By design source code is usually easier to read and write, but it's all syntax sugar and transformations all the way down.
Comment by mirekrusin 27 minutes ago
Comment by bayindirh 1 hour ago
Comment by mirekrusin 1 hour ago
Post training directly evolves existing model weights using the same optimization process that created them.
Software: source code -> compiler -> binary
Models: weights + training data + optimizer -> updated weights
Ie. binary is output of the development process.
Model weights are both – it's output and it's direct input for further development.
Model weight snapshots are continuously used all the time in this iterative process from the very beginning, being output of current step and input to the next step.
Comment by RobotToaster 1 hour ago
But this is neither.
Comment by d2kx 2 hours ago
Comment by rdtsc 2 hours ago
Yeah, serving GLM is a pretty good play on their side. I know they have been criticized for it ("so, you're just reselling GLM...") but it seems practical as in it helps EU companies use it.
Comment by OezMaster 49 minutes ago
Comment by rdtsc 45 minutes ago
Comment by vrganj 6 minutes ago
The government can just force release, even if it's on European servers.
Comment by dmje 34 minutes ago
Comment by Topfi 3 hours ago
At the original pricing in my evals, Mistral Large 4 Preview was not competitive. With this price point and some improvements on top, this full release warrants a major reassessment.
Comment by almindor 2 hours ago
I've been using it for my personal project and it's still too expensive and very slow when thinking. I think we need one more generation from mistral and with maybe 50% of this already "slashed" price for this to be competitive (I use Opus 5.5 at work and it's still much better than this).
Comment by Topfi 2 hours ago
Comment by traceroute66 33 minutes ago
Those in the EU wanting EU-only inference should be aware Mistral put a 10% tax ("upcharge") on Regional Inference[1].
Comment by ismailmaj 3 hours ago
I wonder if it is serving at a loss to get training feedback (maybe using the margins they get from GLM 5.3 serving which is a slightly smaller model but double the price).
Comment by oh_no 1 hour ago
Comment by oh_no 1 hour ago
I really don't think it does, the benchmark numbers are dreadful and the cost is higher than Sol. If you have to use an EU model knock yourself out but there are a ton of models that are a lot smarter for a lot less money.
Comment by jacquesm 1 hour ago
Comment by miroljub 3 hours ago
My coding sessions have a >97% input cache rate. DeepSeek got us spoiled. I am not going to use any AI provider with exorbitant or hidden cache rates.
Comment by Topfi 3 hours ago
So 10x-20x vs Deepseek v4.1 Flash and I don't have on hand how efficient Mistral is regarding cache hits, etc.
On the other hand, could be some decent competition lowering pricing if the models general performance warrants broad hosting.
Comment by esafak 3 hours ago
Comment by Systemerror7A69 2 hours ago
Comment by yako21000 3 hours ago
Comment by strictnein 3 hours ago
- https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B
- https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B-NVFP4Comment by jacquesm 1 hour ago
Comment by prophesi 16 minutes ago
Comment by jacquesm 14 minutes ago
Thanks for the link, appreciated!
Comment by sullivanmatt 14 minutes ago
I have no idea how you could shrink this down to fit on any type of prosumer hardware though. I doubt it's possible.
Comment by jacquesm 12 minutes ago
This is the stuff I've put together and it is clearly too small for this:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/local-inference-with-large-langu...
Comment by downback 2 hours ago
Comment by nunez 18 minutes ago
Comment by 3form 3 hours ago
I feel like stating the obvious here and hence like I'm missing something. Where is the statistic about not refusing the non malicious requests? I can achieve the same performance with refusing when random(1000) < 967.
Comment by kouteiheika 1 hour ago
Guardrails on open-weight models is security theater purely to shield whoever released them from a potential PR nightmare.
Comment by prophesi 13 minutes ago
Comment by pixl97 3 hours ago
Much like having a hacking tool doesn't mean you're doing anything illegal, attacking a machine doesn't necessarily mean you're committing a crime. I can hack the living shit out of my local network if I want to.
Comment by nikanj 2 hours ago
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Comment by monster_truck 3 hours ago
4 bit quants can be fine, try it and see.
Comment by segmondy 2 hours ago
Comment by himata4113 3 hours ago
Comment by echelon 3 hours ago
Please expand on this if you can. Why can't you? Who mandated this?
Comment by derektank 2 hours ago
[0] https://digitalpolicyalert.org/change/20659-physical-and-cyb...
Comment by a012 3 hours ago
Comment by alembic_fumes 2 hours ago
In fairness this doesn't warrant the way that the policy targets Chinese models specifically, but Chinese providers do fall under the broader category of entities that cannot be prosecuted by the U.S. law if such behaviour is found.
Comment by zardo 2 hours ago
Alibaba (Qwen) at least has plenty of people in US offices to go arrest.
Comment by mapontosevenths 3 hours ago
Comment by cyanydeez 2 hours ago
Comment by rcr-anti 3 hours ago
Comment by Taek 3 hours ago
In other words, I don't think there's anything misleading happening in the title. When most people discover that certain restrictions exist on using the weights, they will neither be surprised nor disappointed, because the main thing that's being advertised - the weights are available for download - is true!
Comment by Dylan16807 1 minute ago
If it only restricted resale that would be okay in my book. But this license is stifling.
Comment by captainmuon 3 hours ago
Open source or source available is something else entirely. To consider something source available I would require the actual training data to be available too. That is exceedingly rare.
Comment by mrob 2 hours ago
Comment by dcss_gardener 3 hours ago
"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."
Comment by loire280 3 hours ago
Comment by dcss_gardener 3 hours ago
"Source available" is definitely in much wider use than "weights available" but it's not that common and it's not used consistently at all in my experience.
Weights are different enough from source code I don't find the metaphor useful or compelling. I don't see any value in trying to apply it to a novel subdomain of software engineering, frankly.
Comment by mrob 2 hours ago
Anybody calling SQLite "source available" is mistaken. Are you sure they weren't confusing "source available" with "open core" (Open Source + proprietary add-ons)? SQLite's source code is public domain, which meets the Open Source Definition and is true Open Source. But they also sell proprietary add-ons to fund its development:
Comment by altermetax 2 hours ago
No one calls SQLite "source available", and if they do, they're doing it more as a protest of their development model than being serious.
Comment by jamiejquinn 2 hours ago
Comment by rcr-anti 3 hours ago
Comment by SquareWheel 2 hours ago
You shouldn't. The term existed in the community before they tried to prescriptively define it. They have no authority over the term.
Comment by rat9988 3 hours ago
Comment by Almondsetat 3 hours ago
Comment by pixl97 3 hours ago
That's the neat thing. Nobody is. It is a multi-consensus arrangement where you have different parties that accept different definitions.
>in which case you have to somehow demonstrate that's the way people understand it?
Why?
This is a common mistake a lot of people make. "I think X = 1, therefore everyone that is correct thinks X = 1". There could be huge variation in subgroup understanding on what this should be, and as long as there is no overarching legal requirement then you could consider them all correct on matters of opinion.
Comment by hobofan 3 hours ago
Comment by simias 3 hours ago
If you think about it the actual mapping is more like:
- closed weights -> closed-source web service (e.g. gmail)
- open weights -> closed-source but you get the binaries (e.g. Minecraft)
- Actually open model (with training data, training pipeline etc.) -> open source
Comment by rcr-anti 3 hours ago
Comment by w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 3 hours ago
Comment by stingraycharles 3 hours ago
I think this is really splitting hairs, they just want to give people the ability to self-host (which is awesome) yet still make money off it for cloud based hosting.
But then again, I also always understood that startups want to prevent AWS from capitalizing on their source code as well and sympathize with Elastic, MongoDB, etc so perhaps I’m an outlier here.
Businesses should be able to release things to the public yet still be able to control who makes money off of it.
Comment by mrob 2 hours ago
No. In the context of software licensing, "open" vs. "free" is more a question of philosophy than any practical difference. The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition agree so closely that I can't think of any license that meets one but not the other. But the Free Software Foundation sees freedom as an end in itself, even if it requires sacrificing quality, while the Open Source Initiative sees freedom as a tool to be used to improve software quality.
Comment by hedora 3 hours ago
Comment by btown 3 hours ago
Many industries had "source available" without the word "open" for decades, and that was a broadly understood term. "Weights available" would be a reasonable analogue.
For clarity, the Mistral model license is here: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...
> 2. If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate commercial license with Mistral before using the Model or its derivative works for any commercial purpose. The Licensee may contact Mistral, using this form: https://mistral.ai/contact/, to request a commercial license.
> "Model as a Service" means giving a third party access to the Model or its derivative works for inference or post-training by any means (for instance via API or hosted endpoints), in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data. This does not include (a) end-user products with model capabilities solely embedded within specific features or harnesses, or (b) mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.
"Meaningful control over the inputs" is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. Does a model merely summarizing a user's submitted support tickets, give that user meaningful control over the inputs?
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate that Mistral needs to walk a fine line for its own sustainability, and that sustainability is a good thing! And I may just be an old person ranting at a cloud. But "open" used to mean something, back in my day!
Comment by maxloh 2 hours ago
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
Comment by dannyw 3 hours ago
Works for me. I can host it, I can run it, I can use it; but if I want to sell access to it as an inference provider, I'd have to get a license.
The economics of open-weight models has always been shaky. It's not an OSI license yes, but metaphorically it's kinda like AGPL.
Comment by vincentshipsit 3 hours ago
Comment by xyzzy_plugh 3 hours ago
https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...
Very much not open as in open source. It's a shame an organization such as OSI doesn't get out ahead of licensing of weights, what do we call this? "Weights Available" ?
Comment by maxloh 2 hours ago
Comment by asgeirn 3 hours ago
Comment by contravariant 3 hours ago
If someone sends me a copy while fully adhering to the license, what right does someone have to tell me what I can do with it? If I buy a book do I not have a right to read it? Lend it to people?
It's probably a good thing libraries already existed pre modern copyright.
Comment by rat9988 3 hours ago
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Comment by megalomanu 1 hour ago
Comment by satvikpendem 3 hours ago
Comment by vincentshipsit 3 hours ago
I pick a model on performance for the job, and from what I've seen, this isn't it.
The price cut makes it more interesting than the preview was, tho.
Comment by novaRom 39 minutes ago
I think we will not see any significant increase of that numbers in next 4 - 5 years.
Does MoE depth justify itself to be stored and served as "one" model for particular tasks like agentic coding vs same active params non-MoE model?
Comment by novaRom 22 minutes ago
ChatGPT - stopped using it like a year ago, it feels they deliberately made it ridiculously stupid (for fun?). I know, they were first, but today it's a joke.
Claude - tried it out of curiosity few times, but it's close to nothing when it's about non coding questions. I don't understand how anyone can like its gibberish answers?
Gemini - like many, switched to it like a year ago and it was best choice for daily usage. Nice, clear answers, never nonsense. Somehow they made it faster recently, but answers have become shorter, and it feels slightly stupid (but yet smarter than Claude or ChatGPT).
This was my motivation to try Mistral and I am absolutely amazed how good it is. It answers "in full", smart, search, research, full assessment, examples - looks very much like Pi/Opencode with subagents forking here and there (maybe OpenClaw is what they use?).
I am based in EU, so maybe others geographicly experience is different - again it' all no-subscription just free apps.
Comment by Surac 22 minutes ago
Comment by Muromec 3 hours ago
Comment by jiehong 3 hours ago
Now, perhaps Kimi 3.1 is missing from the benchmarks, and Deepseek 4.1 Flash is still has impressive!
Comment by risphere 3 hours ago
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Comment by pyrale 2 hours ago
I'm going to pass, but nice to know it's open now.
Comment by tokai 3 hours ago
edit: I can see that I'm alone in thinking a company should communicate their business offers publicly, sorry for the question.
Comment by markild 3 hours ago
Clicked sign in, was presented with a sign up form, got a free account. From there could upgrade to pro plan or pay-as-you-go.
I agree it was perhaps too hidden, but calling it hard is not fair I think.
Comment by smodo 1 hour ago
This is on par with European stereotypes about French engineering so I’ll just go along with it :)
Comment by ctolsen 1 hour ago
Comment by InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago
That's because the base offering is free. So you create an account, use it for free, and when you want to pay, click on "Upgrade to Pro."
I've seen some terrible B2B corporate websites that made it impossible to figure out how to give money to a company as a normal person, but I don't think this is one of them.
Comment by cl-coder 3 hours ago
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Comment by satvikpendem 3 hours ago
Maybe your definition of hard is much different than everyone else's...
Comment by dannyw 3 hours ago
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Comment by sisve 3 hours ago
There is a subscription in there. I'm paying.
Comment by embedding-shape 3 hours ago
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Comment by tsss 1 hour ago
At least the FLUX vision models from Europe are pretty good.
Comment by pembrook 2 hours ago
If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.
Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.
I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.
Comment by InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago
What are you talking about? Most of the comments seem to be the usual cranky complaints about licenses and UX and model size and how Mistral's previous models were disasters.
And a huge tell for what? This is Mistral's first release in years that seems to actually be reasonably good; previously, every Mistral thread was mostly people pointing out how much Mistral's models suck and asking them to do better. Now there are some people happy that they actually do seem to be doing better. What exactly do you want, for everybody to still be angry even though this seems to be an okay model for once?
Comment by gmueckl 2 hours ago
Comment by StyloBill 2 hours ago
Source: trust me bro
Comment by VeejayRampay 1 hour ago
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