> 2. If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate commercial license with Mistral before using the Model or its derivative works for any commercial purpose. The Licensee may contact Mistral, using this form: https://mistral.ai/contact/, to request a commercial license.
Calling this "open weight" is misleading. That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
Mistral has been great for us as a provider for our EU-based company. We use Mistral Large 4, GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017 through their API for our B2B2C app for complex work around building blocks for documents and custom tools. A few months ago we weren't sure which EU provider to use, but since they introduced 3rd party models, added more features (now Responses API etc.) and improved their own model, we are quite happy-
They slashed pricing, it's now nearly half vs the preview (Input: $0.7/M Tokens, Output: $2.1/M Tokens vs Input: $1.36/M Tokens, Output: $4.18/M Tokens).
At the original pricing in my evals, Mistral Large 4 Preview was not competitive. With this price point and some improvements on top, this full release warrants a major reassessment.
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).
I just checked, seems you are right. They had roughly a week with the lower pricing, then increased it, now decrease it again. Very odd. My testing was with the higher pricing and looking at AA, theirs seems to have been too.
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).
Irregardless of wether or not Mistral Large 4 is competitive or not, I do not trust the AA numbers anymore, for various reasons. Them changing their numbers around so much recently brings the entire validity of this in question, not to mention if such a combined number is even important at all. The combined "intelligence" score of AA includes areas I do not care about or need at all.
I have access to a server with 4 x h200 cards - 540 GB in total memory, but it appears I have to go to 4bit or 3bit even to serve it. Any idea if that is feasible/desirable (we have restrictions that we can't use a chinese model!).
4 bit quality would be good, but KV cache and compute would probably need more. EXL3 in 3 bit has been okay. If you can't use Chinese models, then definitely try it at 4 bit and see how much you can fit. I'm guessing this is going to be for multiple people, run the numbers and see if it's enough and if not, then try 3 bit. Run evals to see how it performs tho.
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.
Last I heard, US defense contractors had been directed to not use Deepseek in their operations late last year[0], and most have taken that as an indicator that they shouldn’t be using chinese models generally.
Seems like a reasonable policy to me, depending on the sector at the least? Even with open weight / self-hosted models, there's no way to know if the model has been fine-tuned to contain malicious behaviour, triggered only within very specific conditions.
In fairness this doesn't warrant the way that the policy targets Chinese models specifically, but Chinese providers do fall under the broader category of entities that cannot be prosecuted by the U.S. law if such behaviour is found.
"Cyber benchmarks, while achieving an average refusal rate of 96.6% on malicious cyber requests, the highest we measure among open models."
I feel like stating the obvious here and hence like I'm missing something. Where is the statistic about not refusing the non malicious requests? I can achieve the same performance with refusing when random(1000) < 967.
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.
It's not open weight, it's weights available as they use a modified MIT license that is not OSI. It's the common "if you're serving it as a business you need a license" difference, for what it's worth.
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!
I work at a university data center and we host open weight models (as usual, this is my private opinion). I would consider open weight something you can take and self-host for free, also commercially and also that you can use for training and research. Anything else is just, I don't know, just "usable for free in certain cases"?
Open source or source available is something else entirely. To consider something source available I would require the actual training data to be available too. That is exceedingly rare.
"Open weight" is obviously intended to be analogous to "open source". The name only exists because people rightly complained about people calling weights "open source" when they were not. As such, the most reasonable interpretation is something that obeys the Open Source Definition as closely as possible, but ignores clause 2 because obeying it is legally impossible when the source code infringes copyright (as is the case with almost all LLMs). If it ignores any of the other clauses, it's instead closer to "source available" software, so the correct analogous name is "weights available".
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."
I've also heard it used to describe projects that are open source by anyone's measure but have contribution or project governance requirements like for example sqlite.
"Source available" is definitely in much wider use than "weights available" but it's not that common and it's not used consistently at all in my experience.
Weights are different enough from source code I don't find the metaphor useful or compelling. I don't see any value in trying to apply it to a novel subdomain of software engineering, frankly.
>I've also heard it used to describe projects that are open source by anyone's measure but have contribution or project governance requirements like for example sqlite.
Anybody calling SQLite "source available" is mistaken. Are you sure they weren't confusing "source available" with "open core" (Open Source + proprietary add-ons)? SQLite's source code is public domain, which meets the Open Source Definition and is true Open Source. But they also sell proprietary add-ons to fund its development:
Honestly, I think "source available" is used pretty consistently, and if someone said "weights available" I would immediately understand what they mean.
No one calls SQLite "source available", and if they do, they're doing it more as a protest of their development model than being serious.
Then who is an authority on the topic? Or are you trying to make a common usage argument, in which case you have to somehow demonstrate that's the way people understand it?
That's the neat thing. Nobody is. It is a multi-consensus arrangement where you have different parties that accept different definitions.
>in which case you have to somehow demonstrate that's the way people understand it?
Why?
This is a common mistake a lot of people make. "I think X = 1, therefore everyone that is correct thinks X = 1". There could be huge variation in subgroup understanding on what this should be, and as long as there is no overarching legal requirement then you could consider them all correct on matters of opinion.
It's the same distinction as "open source" vs "source available" (when speaking about source code). It's not that widely in use because few people in the LLM space are diligent enough with IP to make the distinction, but the concept is easily transferable.
True, they don't own the word open. Words mean what people agree they mean, and insisting on more expansive definitions of open got the ecosystem from restrictive licenses in the llama 2 and 3 days to most noteworthy models being MIT, Apache, or OpenMDW (permissive but specifically for model weights).
I believe there should be a way to distinguish this type of open-weight model from one that you can find hosted by someone else, such as Chinese models.
I think this is really splitting hairs, they just want to give people the ability to self-host (which is awesome) yet still make money off it for cloud based hosting.
But then again, I also always understood that startups want to prevent AWS from capitalizing on their source code as well and sympathize with Elastic, MongoDB, etc so perhaps I’m an outlier here.
Businesses should be able to release things to the public yet still be able to control who makes money off of it.
No. In the context of software licensing, "open" vs. "free" is more a question of philosophy than any practical difference. The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition agree so closely that I can't think of any license that meets one but not the other. But the Free Software Foundation sees freedom as an end in itself, even if it requires sacrificing quality, while the Open Source Initiative sees freedom as a tool to be used to improve software quality.
Many of the Chinese models are not open weight. The larger Qwen models are a good example. I assumed I could use flash next however I wanted to, since it is easy to download and runs on low-wattage desktops, but nope.
Calling this open weight is misleading. That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
Just because OpenAI ran roughshod over the broader software community's notion of "open" which once heavily implied free-as-in-software-not-beer, doesn't mean we need to continue this pattern.
Many industries had "source available" without the word "open" for decades, and that was a broadly understood term. "Weights available" would be a reasonable analogue.
> 2. If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate commercial license with Mistral before using the Model or its derivative works for any commercial purpose. The Licensee may contact Mistral, using this form: https://mistral.ai/contact/, to request a commercial license.
> "Model as a Service" means giving a third party access to the Model or its derivative works for inference or post-training by any means (for instance via API or hosted endpoints), in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data. This does not include (a) end-user products with model capabilities solely embedded within specific features or harnesses, or (b) mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.
"Meaningful control over the inputs" is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. Does a model merely summarizing a user's submitted support tickets, give that user meaningful control over the inputs?
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate that Mistral needs to walk a fine line for its own sustainability, and that sustainability is a good thing! And I may just be an old person ranting at a cloud. But "open" used to mean something, back in my day!
"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.
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" ?
The OSI actually published an "open-source" definition for model weights, which requires the training code and training data composition to be published. The exact training corpus can remain private though.
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.
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.
Their last 2 models were a disaster and didn't live up to their self reported evals. I hope this time around is much better. I'm happy tho that they are still figuring out how to get better even if only measured against themselves. This is great, the more options we have the better for everyone.
Finally, Le Chaton Fat. However, I'm not sure how well Mistral is doing in comparison to the other open-weight models, particularly Chinese ones, and I guess one would only really use Mistral if they want to have EU provenance for models.
I see the logo of my company in this picture and I don't have it my harness dropdown. I guess they hallucilied (vibe truthed?) the list just a little bit.
Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.
If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.
Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.
I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.
Unrelated to Large 4, but why is it so hard to give money to Mistral? Now they finally have a model that might be worth using, but I cannot for my life figure out how to give them money and be allowed to use their model. Its really shouldn't take more than a couple of clicks to get to a payment option.
edit: I can see that I'm alone in thinking a company should communicate their business offers publicly, sorry for the question.
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!
What? It seems very doable for people who are interested in it, are you one of those people? Because it sure seems like you're trying your hardest to not find the answer yourself.
Calling this "open weight" is misleading. That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?
Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
At the original pricing in my evals, Mistral Large 4 Preview was not competitive. With this price point and some improvements on top, this full release warrants a major reassessment.
[0] https://docs.mistral.ai/inference/pricing
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).
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).
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.
So 10x-20x vs Deepseek v4.1 Flash and I don't have on hand how efficient Mistral is regarding cache hits, etc.
On the other hand, could be some decent competition lowering pricing if the models general performance warrants broad hosting.
4 bit quants can be fine, try it and see.
Please expand on this if you can. Why can't you? Who mandated this?
[0] https://digitalpolicyalert.org/change/20659-physical-and-cyb...
In fairness this doesn't warrant the way that the policy targets Chinese models specifically, but Chinese providers do fall under the broader category of entities that cannot be prosecuted by the U.S. law if such behaviour is found.
I feel like stating the obvious here and hence like I'm missing something. Where is the statistic about not refusing the non malicious requests? I can achieve the same performance with refusing when random(1000) < 967.
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.
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!
Open source or source available is something else entirely. To consider something source available I would require the actual training data to be available too. That is exceedingly rare.
"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."
"Source available" is definitely in much wider use than "weights available" but it's not that common and it's not used consistently at all in my experience.
Weights are different enough from source code I don't find the metaphor useful or compelling. I don't see any value in trying to apply it to a novel subdomain of software engineering, frankly.
Anybody calling SQLite "source available" is mistaken. Are you sure they weren't confusing "source available" with "open core" (Open Source + proprietary add-ons)? SQLite's source code is public domain, which meets the Open Source Definition and is true Open Source. But they also sell proprietary add-ons to fund its development:
https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html
No one calls SQLite "source available", and if they do, they're doing it more as a protest of their development model than being serious.
https://opensource.org/ai/open-weights
That's the neat thing. Nobody is. It is a multi-consensus arrangement where you have different parties that accept different definitions.
>in which case you have to somehow demonstrate that's the way people understand it?
Why?
This is a common mistake a lot of people make. "I think X = 1, therefore everyone that is correct thinks X = 1". There could be huge variation in subgroup understanding on what this should be, and as long as there is no overarching legal requirement then you could consider them all correct on matters of opinion.
You shouldn't. The term existed in the community before they tried to prescriptively define it. They have no authority over the term.
If you think about it the actual mapping is more like:
- closed weights -> closed-source web service (e.g. gmail)
- open weights -> closed-source but you get the binaries (e.g. Minecraft)
- Actually open model (with training data, training pipeline etc.) -> open source
I think this is really splitting hairs, they just want to give people the ability to self-host (which is awesome) yet still make money off it for cloud based hosting.
But then again, I also always understood that startups want to prevent AWS from capitalizing on their source code as well and sympathize with Elastic, MongoDB, etc so perhaps I’m an outlier here.
Businesses should be able to release things to the public yet still be able to control who makes money off of it.
No. In the context of software licensing, "open" vs. "free" is more a question of philosophy than any practical difference. The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition agree so closely that I can't think of any license that meets one but not the other. But the Free Software Foundation sees freedom as an end in itself, even if it requires sacrificing quality, while the Open Source Initiative sees freedom as a tool to be used to improve software quality.
Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.
Many industries had "source available" without the word "open" for decades, and that was a broadly understood term. "Weights available" would be a reasonable analogue.
For clarity, the Mistral model license is here: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...
> 2. If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate commercial license with Mistral before using the Model or its derivative works for any commercial purpose. The Licensee may contact Mistral, using this form: https://mistral.ai/contact/, to request a commercial license.
> "Model as a Service" means giving a third party access to the Model or its derivative works for inference or post-training by any means (for instance via API or hosted endpoints), in a manner that allows such third party to exercise meaningful control over the inputs, parameters, or training data. This does not include (a) end-user products with model capabilities solely embedded within specific features or harnesses, or (b) mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.
"Meaningful control over the inputs" is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. Does a model merely summarizing a user's submitted support tickets, give that user meaningful control over the inputs?
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate that Mistral needs to walk a fine line for its own sustainability, and that sustainability is a good thing! And I may just be an old person ranting at a cloud. But "open" used to mean something, back in my day!
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.
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" ?
https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition
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 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.
Now, perhaps Kimi 3.1 is missing from the benchmarks, and Deepseek 4.1 Flash is still has impressive!
I'm going to pass, but nice to know it's open now.
If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.
Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.
I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.
edit: I can see that I'm alone in thinking a company should communicate their business offers publicly, sorry for the question.
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.
Maybe your definition of hard is much different than everyone else's...
There is a subscription in there. I'm paying.