# Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk

> Source: <https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/6/le-chonk/>
> Published: 2026-10-06 20:18:19+00:00

[Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/)

The preview is available via their API. They promise to release the open weights model at the "end of this month".

The model only supports two reasoning levels - "none" and "high" - via the Mistral API. Here are [both pelicans](https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F0db8b8196e57711b352f6c5857cf5b35) - the "high" one looks better, though surprisingly it only used 2,717 output tokens compared to "none" which used 3,275:

On Artificial Analysis [it scores 38](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mistral-large-4), just behind DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, which is a 552B model. It's a *huge* improvement on last December's Mistral Large 3, which drew [this terrible pelican](https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F0df5e656291d5a7a1bf012fabc9edc3f#response-1) and [scored 9 on AA](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mistral-large-3).

It's certainly not a Fable-class model, but it's great to see Mistral put out a model that's back to being maybe about 6 months behind the frontier.

Via [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977979)

Tags: [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [mistral](https://simonwillison.net/tags/mistral), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle](https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle), [llm-release](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm-release)