Mistral Is SO Back: Inside Le Chonk, the West’s Biggest Open Model (Pierre Stock, VP Science, Mistral)

The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck · Oct 22, 2026 · 1h 19m

Mistral AI is back in the frontier AI race. Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” is a 1-trillion-parameter open-weight model, trained in two months on 3,800 GPUs in Mistral’s own European datacenters — and independently rated the best open model outside China alongside Meta’s Muse Spark Open. After a year when open-weight AI meant DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and GLM, October brought a wave of Western open models, with Mistral at the front of it. Pierre Stock, Mistral’s VP of Science and first employee, walks through how the model was built: mixture-of-experts explained, what Mistral borrowed from…