Mistral Large 4's weights carry a model-as-a-service condition
Mistral published the weights for Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk", on Hugging Face on 29 October, a little over three weeks after the API preview. The repository is Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B: about a trillion parameters, 49 billion active per token (52 billion with embeddings and output layers), and a one-million-token context window. The licence is the Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight License, a modified MIT. Section 2 requires a licensee whose business, or an affiliate's, is model-as-a-service to take a separate commercial licence from Mistral before any commercial use of the model. Excluded are end-user products that embed the capabilities in specific features, and relaying to models others host. Section 3 exempts internal use and use through Mistral's products.
Artificial Analysis scored the released checkpoint at 26 on Intelligence Index v5, ninth of the twenty-one large open-weight models it ranks, behind GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on 32 each. The eight above it are Chinese, making it the highest-scoring open-weight model built outside China. Mistral says it trained the model on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in its own European data centres. API pricing is $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output, and the model card documents vLLM and SGLang serving. A team selling third parties open access to run their own inputs and parameters needs the commercial licence; one self-hosting for its own staff does not.
Schwarz Group leads Cohere's CAD $7bn target and Canada takes an equity stake
Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E targeting up to CAD $7 billion on 29 October, which it says would represent a CAD $35.7 billion valuation. The companies of Schwarz Group, the German owner of Lidl and Kaufland, are the lead investor; Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada are also new; Nvidia, Inovia Capital and Prosperity7 Ventures returned. Canada is taking an equity stake of up to C$1.6 billion, paid in stages against reporting on commitments to create at least 1,000 new high-paying Canadian technical jobs by 2030, put at least C$1.7 billion into additional Canadian computing infrastructure by 2030, maintain Canadian incorporation and headquarters, and keep working with the Canadian AI Safety Institute.
Christian Müller, CEO of Schwarz Digits, said the goal is "to anchor these frontier capabilities in our sovereign STACKIT cloud infrastructure". Cohere declined to say how much of the CAD $7 billion target is committed, though chief financial officer Francois Chadwick told Bloomberg the initial close includes "most of it". No date or price has been published for STACKIT hosting.
Quick Hits
- Oracle will charge for AI work in "AI units" on top of application subscriptions. Chris Leone, executive vice president of Oracle Applications Development, set it out at Oracle's 28 October investor day. No price or start date was given (The Register).
- Google's AI Mode searches earn less than its ad-served search. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler blamed "lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode" on the 28 October call. Search revenue rose 12%, against 14.5% a year earlier (The Register).
- Baseten released joey-1, a 2-billion-parameter decision model under an MIT licence, at $0.01 per million input tokens with output free. Its model card ranks it 37th of 230 on the Jev Decision Index 0.4 public split.
- FuriosaAI raised $620 million at about a $2.9 billion valuation for its RNGD inference cards. Korea's National Growth Fund invested $280 million. Samsung SDS has sold an NPU-as-a-service on RNGD since July; LG Group runs its EXAONE deployments on it.