ZDNET’s key takeaways

As planned, Mistral has released the weights for its ML4 model.

ML4 sets a new bar for Western open models.

Open models are increasingly competitive with proprietary models.

French AI lab Mistral shipped its latest model, Mistral Large 4 (ML4), nicknamed “Le Chonk” for its trillion-parameter size, in preview on Oct. 6 . As promised, the lab has released the model’s weights , alongside some new benchmark scores that show Western open models gaining ground over their Chinese peers.

Also: Open weights vs. closed: An AI civil war’s afoot

New coding performance ranking

ML4’s score on the agentic coding benchmark Terminal-Bench 4.0 jumped to 41% from its preview version’s 28% to 41%, beating Opencode’s GLM-5.3 by one small but important point. On the overall Index , however, which shows a model’s composite score across three relevant benchmarks, ML4 is a point behind GLM-5.3, scoring a 48 to GLM-5.3’s 49.…