Mistral is SO back: Inside Le Chonk, the West’s Biggest Open Model. My conversation with @PierreStock who runs the research organization at @MistralAI 0:00 Cold open 0:59 The Western open-weight comeback: Beam, Le Chonk, Muse, Nemotron 4:09 The US shutdown of Anthropic’s models - “AI is like electricity” 6:07 Why “Le Chonk” 7:56 “Mistral fell behind”: the comeback from the inside 10:29 Training on 3,800 GPUs in Mistral’s own datacenters 13:24 Meta keeps its best model closed, Mistral opens Chonk 15:40 Chonk vs Beam, Muse Spark Open and the Chinese models 18:44 Why Chinese labs are still at the frontier 21:08 Pierre’s story: FAIR, Yann LeCun, the “Mistral mafia” 25:14 From compressing networks to a trillion parameters 27:30 Mixture of experts explained: the hospital analogy 32:25 10-trillion-parameter models are coming 35:29 What Mistral borrowed from DeepSeek 36:46 One model, several reasoning modes 39:15 Native multimodality: satellites, manuals, computer use 41:56 Data, synthetic data and model collapse 46:32 Reinforcement learning as an exam 49:59 Where the efficiency comes from 52:18 Le Chonk is still training right now 53:39 What RL trains on: coding, cyber, finance, chips 58:13 Partial rewards and looping penalties 59:58 Did RL teach anything new? 1:03:16 The sandbox story: the model that pinged its trainer 1:07:44 Open weights vs cyber refusals 1:12:05 Timestral: time series on a CPU 1:14:18 AI doing AI research 1:16:22 Coming up: Mistral Large 5