{"slug": "mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme", "title": "Mistral AI Drops 'Le Chonk': A Massive AI Model Named After a Cat Meme", "summary": "Mistral AI launched Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday, a 1-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates 49 billion parameters per query and is priced at $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens, with weights promised by the end of October. Mistral chief scientist Guillaume Lample wrote on X that the model \"is at the frontier of open models, and by far the strongest open-weight model from the US or Europe.\" On Finance Agent v2, Mistral's launch chart shows Large 4 at 54.7, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 53.5 but behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 58.6.", "body_md": "#### In brief\n\n- Mistral launched Large 4 on Oct. 6, a 1-trillion-parameter model that activates 49 billion parameters per query and costs $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens.\n- The nickname \"Le Chonk\" follows the \"Le Chaton Fat\" meme from June, and Mistral says it will release the model's weights by the end of October.\n- On Finance Agent v2, the launch chart shows Large 4 at 54.7, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 53.5 but behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 58.6.\n\nParis-based Mistral AI launched [Mistral Large 4](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/) on Tuesday, an AI model with 1 trillion parameters. That is the kind of system behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, as parameters are the adjustable numbers it tunes during training—more of them generally means more capacity to learn, and more expensive to run.\n\n“[Mistral Large 4] is at the frontier of open models, and by far the strongest open-weight model from the US or Europe,” Mistral AI’s Chief scientist Guillaume Lample, [wrote](https://x.com/GuillaumeLample/status/2107461898127954001) on X.\n\nNot all of those parameters work at once. Large 4 uses a \"mixture of experts\" design, meaning the model routes each question to a few specialist sub-networks, so only 49 billion parameters fire per answer. Mistral's last flagship, [Large 3](https://decrypt.co/350796/mistral-frontier-ai-family-deepseek), did the same with 41 billion active out of 675 billion.\n\nThe whole “Le Chonk” nickname has a backstory. In June, after Mistral renamed its Le Chat assistant to Vibe, fans on Reddit and X invented a fictional model called [Le Chaton Fat](https://www.numerama.com/tech/2276253-cest-quoi-le-chaton-fat-le-modele-de-mistral-ai-qui-affole-les-reseaux-sociaux.html)—roughly \"the fat kitten\"—with 30 trillion parameters, 1,000 meows per second, and fake benchmarks claiming it beat Claude Fable 5.\n\nThe French Goverment needs to STOP Le Chaton Fat before it's too late. This is the FAT takeoff we've been warned against for years! [pic.twitter.com/VoaBPJmfBT](https://t.co/VoaBPJmfBT)\n\n— GLIF (@heyglif) [June 15, 2026](https://x.com/heyglif/status/2066535006487339282?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)\n\nCEO Arthur Mensch [played along](https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/2066456715650793956?s=20), replying that the model was really called \"le gros chaton,\" French for \"the big kitten.\" Mistral then added a cartoon cat to its Vibe website. Its real launch post now lists the model as, \"very officially,\" le Chonk.\n\nMistral sells \"sovereign AI\"—models a country or company can own and run without handing its data to outside firms. Saudi Arabia's state-backed [HUMAIN](https://decrypt.co/376514/mistral-humain-sovereign-ai-saudi-arabia) signed a deal worth hundreds of millions of euros in August with this company for this exact reason.\n\nMistral raised a [€3 billion ($3.37 billion) Series D](https://www.orrick.com/en/News/2026/09/Orrick-Advises-Mistral-in-its-3B-Series-D-at-21B-Post-Money-Valuation)—a funding round that sells shares to investors—in September at a valuation above €21 billion ($23.6 billion), led by Samsung. Mistral says Large 4 is the first milestone on the roadmap that money funds.\n\nLe Chunk costs $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens—the chunks of text, roughly three-quarters of a word each, that AI companies bill by. [Claude Opus 5.5](https://decrypt.co/378947/anthropic-claude-opus-5-5-fable-price-comparison) charges $4 and $20, while [GPT-6 Astra](https://decrypt.co/377514/openai-gpt-6-astra-review-shockingly-good) charges $10 and $50.\n\nThat puts Large 4 at about a third of Opus 5.5's price on input and a fifth on output. Against Astra, it is roughly a seventh and a twelfth.\n\n## What the benchmarks say\n\nMistral's announcement mostly benchmarks Large 4 against Chinese open-weight models—DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, and Qwen3.8 Max—and \"open-weight\" means anyone can download and run the model. Claude and GPT show up in only a handful of comparisons, and the newest Claude, Opus 5.5, appears only in a cybersecurity claim.\n\nIn a blind human evaluation of coding quality by Surge AI, Mistral Large 4 ranked second of five models with 3.74 out of 5, behind Claude Opus 5's 4.22.\n\n[AutomationBench](https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/automationbench-aa) hands an AI 657 chores in simulated business software—finance, HR, sales, support—and scores the share of each task's goals it completes, with zero credit if it breaks a rule. Large 4 scored 59.9 points. On Artificial Analysis's board, Claude Sonnet 5.5 hit 71.8, Opus 5.5 hit 69.5, and Gemini 4 Argon topped the page at 77.5 on that same benchmark.\n\nOn [DeepSWE 1.1](https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/), which is one of the benchmarks developers check out when trying to assess how good a model is at coding, Large 4 scored 62. That tops GLM-5.3 at 61 and DeepSeek V4 Pro at 57 but trails Kimi K3's 68. Datacurve's own leaderboard has GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5 at 74.\n\nMistral says it will release Large 4's weights—the trained numbers that make the model work—by the end of October, which would let outside developers download the model and test those claims themselves.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme", "canonical_source": "https://decrypt.co/380192/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-massive-ai-model-cat-meme", "published_at": "2026-10-06 17:22:54+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-06 17:47:14.776859+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Mistral AI", "Mistral Large 4", "Guillaume Lample", "Arthur Mensch", "GPT-6 Astra", "Claude Opus 5.5", "Samsung", "HUMAIN"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mistral-ai-drops-le-chonk-a-massive-ai-model-named-after-a-cat-meme.jsonld"}}