The race between open and closed AI is on, and Europe is still in the mix. On Tuesday, French AI lab Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4 (ML4), a new large multimodal model aiming to leapfrog both American and Chinese rivals ' following what French president Macron described as 'a third way in AI.' Amid a growing divide between closed models that can be unplugged and open models that are often made in China, Mistral is positioning ML4 as an alternative to both. Nicknamed Le Chonk in reference to its 1 trillion parameters, ML4 is definitely not small; but is not an open-weight model yet. For the time being, it can only be accessed via a public guardrail endpoint, but Mistral plans to make its weights available in just three weeks, after safety testing is complete. 'In the meantime, we'll work with trusted partners and governments to make sure that the open source weights can be used to defend, but not to [perform] malicious attacks,' Mistral VP Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch....
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