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Mistral Gave Away a Trillion-Parameter AI. Here’s Who Can Actually Run It.

Anyone can download Mistral Large 4. I worked out the memory, the machines and the bill to run it. “Open” turns out to have a price tag.

Delini

14 min read2 hours ago

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Press enter or click to view image in full size Cover: The model is free. The memory to hold it is not. Image credit: Author’s own illustration, drawn in code; figures from the author’s calculations, https://github.com/delini2018-del/ai-open-weights-cost

A trillion parameters, free to download

On October 29, 2026, the French AI company Mistral rel⁠eased the full weights of its biggest model, Mistral Large 4, on Hugging Face. The repos⁠itory name says most of what you need to know: Mistra⁠l-Large-4–1T-A52B. About one trillion parameters in total, around 5⁠2 billion of them active for each word it produces.…