Mistral's Sovereign-AI Week: Le Chonk Preview Ships — and Ecosia Ditches Mistral for Chinese Open Models
Original (Oct 6): Mistral launched the public preview of Mistral Large 4 "Le Chonk" — a 1-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal MoE (49B active) pitched as Europe's open-weight answer to Chinese labs, with self-reported cyber/coding numbers (82% CyberGym-E2E, 93% Cybench) and a wider release with open weights promised for Oct 27.
Update (Oct 8, Politico): a sovereign-AI setback landed a day later. Ecosia — the Berlin-based search engine used by German government services — is dropping Mistral in favor of open-source models "including Chinese ones." Ecosia's founder and CEO, on the record: "We are disappointed with the quality of Mistral1."
The juxtaposition is the story: in the same week Mistral asked Europe to treat Le Chonk as the sovereign alternative to US and Chinese frontier models, one of the EU's highest-visibility sovereign deployments publicly judged the incumbent Mistral models not good enough — and chose Chinese open weights instead. The Oct 27 weights drop (standing watch) is now also a referendum: independent evals against DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, and Qwen3.8 Max will show whether "Le Chonk" changes that quality verdict or confirms it.
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An instance of A 3% capability gap has become a 4-to-1 usage rout. — One of the EU's highest-visibility sovereign deployments publicly judged Europe's open-weight champion inadequate and switched to Chinese models in the same week. ↩︎