Mistral AI Drops 'Le Chonk': A Massive AI Model Named After a Cat Meme

In brief

Mistral launched Large 4 on Oct. 6, a 1-trillion-parameter model that activates 49 billion parameters per query and costs $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens.

The nickname "Le Chonk" follows the "Le Chaton Fat" meme from June, and Mistral says it will release the model's weights by the end of October.

On Finance Agent v2, the launch chart shows Large 4 at 54.7, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 53.5 but behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 58.6.

Paris-based Mistral AI launched Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday, an AI model with 1 trillion parameters. That is the kind of system behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, as parameters are the adjustable numbers it tunes during training—more of them generally means more capacity to learn, and more expensive to run.

“[Mistral Large 4] is at the frontier of open models, and by far the strongest open-weight model from the US or Europe,” Mistral AI’s Chief scientist Guillaume Lample, wrote on X.

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Not all of those parameters work at once. Large 4 uses a "mixture of experts" design, meaning the model routes each question to a few specialist sub-networks, so only 49 billion parameters fire per answer. Mistral's last flagship, Large 3, did the same with 41 billion active out of 675 billion.

The whole “Le Chonk” nickname has a backstory. In June, after Mistral renamed its Le Chat assistant to Vibe, fans on Reddit and X invented a fictional model called Le Chaton Fat—roughly "the fat kitten"—with 30 trillion parameters, 1,000 meows per second, and fake benchmarks claiming it beat Claude Fable 5.

The French Goverment needs to STOP Le Chaton Fat before it's too late. This is the FAT takeoff we've been warned against for years! pic.twitter.com/VoaBPJmfBT

— GLIF (@heyglif) June 15, 2026

CEO Arthur Mensch played along, replying that the model was really called "le gros chaton," French for "the big kitten." Mistral then added a cartoon cat to its Vibe website. Its real launch post now lists the model as, "very officially," le Chonk.

Mistral sells "sovereign AI"—models a country or company can own and run without handing its data to outside firms. Saudi Arabia's state-backed HUMAIN signed a deal worth hundreds of millions of euros in August with this company for this exact reason.

Mistral raised a €3 billion ($3.37 billion) Series D—a funding round that sells shares to investors—in September at a valuation above €21 billion ($23.6 billion), led by Samsung. Mistral says Large 4 is the first milestone on the roadmap that money funds.

BitcoinBTC · USD$85,625+3.07%Sep 29Oct 1Oct 3Oct 4Oct 6$86.8k$85.6k$84.3k$83.0k24h HighHigh$86,64824h LowLow$85,122VolVol$1.1BMarket projectionsOdds by MyriadThis weekBelow $86,000Below $86k56% chance→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →Le Chunk costs $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens—the chunks of text, roughly three-quarters of a word each, that AI companies bill by. Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4 and $20, while GPT-6 Astra charges $10 and $50.