Mistral unveils Chonk open-weight AI model

French AI startup Mistral announced on Tuesday, October 6, its biggest open-weight model, called Chonk, aimed at clients that want to keep more control over their data and AI systems.

Mistral said the model lets users download and customise the weights that determine how it computes, allowing deployment on their own servers. Customers can also access the model through Mistral's infrastructure, including a European sovereign region where the company says data remains under EU jurisdiction.

The launch is Mistral's first major product release since it raised three billion euros, or $3.4 billion, last month. The company said Chonk was built on 4,000 Nvidia chips over two months at its own data centres in Europe and was trained on more than 160 languages.

Mistral said Chonk's benchmark scores make it one of the strongest open-weight models available and “by far the best in Europe and the US”. It also said the model has cyber-defence capabilities for enterprises and governments. Those performance and security claims are Mistral's own statements.