This is the new OSI Open source definition for AI models:

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.

We are now at the mercy of labs to provide frontier models as open-weight. Now that even some Chinese labs are releasing their models as weight-available, what stops them from restricting their next models to internal use? What about public chatbots?

Existing models will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.

I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.

I don't recall their being a huge backlash to elasticsearch ELv2. Mostly people seemed receptive to blocking the major cloud providers from mooching off the project, and the need to protect their revenue.

People need to make money.

This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.

Yep and it's the same for Meta's "open" models which you omitted from the list.

Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?

If they want to be open source, they also need to, y'know, open the source.

Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc

> but since they introduced 3rd party models, added more features (now Responses API etc.) and improved their own model, we are quite happy-

Yeah, serving GLM is a pretty good play on their side. I know they have been criticized for it ("so, you're just reselling GLM...") but it seems practical as in it helps EU companies use it.

They didn't. Original price was maybe higher but they slashed it during preview and in fact it was lower by a bit ($0.68/M tokens) and $2.09 for output.

I've been using it for my personal project and it's still too expensive and very slow when thinking. I think we need one more generation from mistral and with maybe 50% of this already "slashed" price for this to be competitive (I use Opus 5.5 at work and it's still much better than this).

Given the size of the model, that's very aggressive pricing.

I wonder if it is serving at a loss to get training feedback (maybe using the margins they get from GLM 5.3 serving which is a slightly smaller model but double the price).

Why does everyone avoid publishing the most important part of the pricing while doing a comparison?

My coding sessions have a >97% input cache rate. DeepSeek got us spoiled. I am not going to use any AI provider with exorbitant or hidden cache rates.

seems better now, but still, it will be hard to compete. It's just that a direct comparison to frontier models will not speak to Mistrals favor.

These statistics and safeguards are pretty much meaningless, because it's completely trivial to get around them. You can prefill and edit the model's responses/thinking and force it to agree to virtually anything even with unmodified weights, and if you don't want to bother with jailbreaking and can host it yourself it's essentially a one-man weekend project to uncensor the model and have it agree with anything you want by default.

Guardrails on open-weight models is security theater purely to shield whoever released them from a potential PR nightmare.

Yea, the problem with maliciousness is intent.

Much like having a hacking tool doesn't mean you're doing anything illegal, attacking a machine doesn't necessarily mean you're committing a crime. I can hack the living shit out of my local network if I want to.

Nobody cares about that number, because refusals don't lead to company-ending news headlines.

Thanks

One thing you should have figured out by now is that you can't trust what other people say because they know just about as much as you do and there's good odds they did it wrong.

4 bit quants can be fine, try it and see.

4 bit quality would be good, but you need more GPU, the 4bit weight is 610gb. EXL3 in 3 bit has been okay the few times I used it. https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B-NVF...

use MoE offloading

> we have restrictions that we can't use a chinese model!

Please expand on this if you can. Why can't you? Who mandated this?

Everyone that I know considers something to be 'open weight' if the weights are available to the public in some form or another.

In other words, I don't think there's anything misleading happening in the title. When most people discover that certain restrictions exist on using the weights, they will neither be surprised nor disappointed, because the main thing that's being advertised - the weights are available for download - is true!

Where did you get this definition of open weight and who else uses it? The weights are published. Open source is already its own more restrictive category. What would you prefer we call this kind of release?

"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."

"The requirements set forth in Section 2 do not apply to: (a) internal use of the Model or its derivative works, defined as any use that does not make the Model or its derivative works available to third parties, [...]"

Works for me. I can host it, I can run it, I can use it; but if I want to sell access to it as an inference provider, I'd have to get a license.

The economics of open-weight models has always been shaky. It's not an OSI license yes, but metaphorically it's kinda like AGPL.

Raw license text:

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...

Very much not open as in open source. It's a shame an organization such as OSI doesn't get out ahead of licensing of weights, what do we call this? "Weights Available" ?

Specifically, if you're serving it as a "Model as a Service" business you need a license. Other uses do not.

It's always a bit unclear to me to what extent you're bound by a copyright when you're not distributing a work.

If someone sends me a copy while fully adhering to the license, what right does someone have to tell me what I can do with it? If I buy a book do I not have a right to read it? Lend it to people?

It's probably a good thing libraries already existed pre modern copyright.

I think this open debate depends on who you talk to. Not all the people agree with this vision.

You think copyright applies in this industry? The AI companies certainly don't think it does.

Meh, that's more of a website ToS than an enforceable license. These weights weren't human authored and lack copyright. the enforceability of these terms are tantamount to a website ToS because Mistral would have to rely on contract law.

I’m a casual user out of principle and it’s fine. Nothing extraordinary but capable of assisting coding sessions. It won’t one shot a cancer medicine but it handles my Rust projects well. Mind you I don’t like the style of LLM use where people just brute force their way to a working state from a very high level prompt. I mostly ask it to implement tickets/issues I write beforehand.

EU provenance doesn't matter much to me.

I pick a model on performance for the job, and from what I've seen, this isn't it.

The price cut makes it more interesting than the preview was, tho.

I was curious about this, as I’ve seen it so many times for multiple providers, especially Mistral and Google.

Clicked sign in, was presented with a sign up form, got a free account. From there could upgrade to pro plan or pay-as-you-go.

I agree it was perhaps too hidden, but calling it hard is not fair I think.

> I cannot for my life figure out how to give them money

That's because the base offering is free. So you create an account, use it for free, and when you want to pay, click on "Upgrade to Pro."

I've seen some terrible B2B corporate websites that made it impossible to figure out how to give money to a company as a normal person, but I don't think this is one of them.

Well the Mistral portal is honestly kind of confusing, considering that most people just want to enter CC details and get an API key.. But it's doable!

It's as easy as going to console.mistral.ai no ?

> Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.

What are you talking about? Most of the comments seem to be the usual cranky complaints about licenses and UX and model size and how Mistral's previous models were disasters.

And a huge tell for what? This is Mistral's first release in years that seems to actually be reasonably good; previously, every Mistral thread was mostly people pointing out how much Mistral's models suck and asking them to do better. Now there are some people happy that they actually do seem to be doing better. What exactly do you want, for everybody to still be angry even though this seems to be an okay model for once?

Okay, why is it not good enough?

"The model is not competitive."

Source: trust me bro