r/xprivo

Just as Mistral unveiled Large 4, Germany’s Ecosia announced that it was moving away from the French AI company and toward models including China’s Qwen, GLM, and Kimi. CEO Christian Kroll cites the replacement's roughly halved costs and disappointing quality from Mistral models. He also questioned France’s reliance on nuclear power.

These arguments raise legitimate questions. Does European sovereignty mean hosting whichever foreign-developed model performs best, or does it also mean investing in Europe’s ability to build competitive models of its own? Mistral responded by inviting Ecosia to test its new release before dismissing it.

Moreover, model choice is only part of the picture. According to Ecosia’s own privacy documentation, the company shares search queries and IP addresses with Microsoft Bing or Google into the U.S. when those partners provide results. Being a European company does not automatically ensure that your data stays within European-controlled services.

At xPrivo, our position is simple: we back European AI and European infrastructure. European providers only grow if European products actually use them. We also want models that understand European languages, culture, and values.
- Mistral is our default in both the search engine and the AI assistant.
- AI answers in search are off by default, and users who choose AI in the search engine get Mistral by default.
- We’ve also integrated Kolibri, another European model from Germany, for everyone and for free.

Chinese models are well known for censorship: China's generative AI regulations require outputs to reflect "core socialist values", and models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax, Qwen and GLM have been widely reported to avoid or deflect questions and criticism about historical and current Chinese events and political figures.

Switching to Chinese models isn’t a neutral technical choice because it weakens the European AI ecosystem right when it needs customers.
Would you prioritize the best available model, regardless of its origin, or accept some trade-offs to help build a stronger European alternative? What do you think?

Following Aleph Alpha’s Kolibri release on October 3, France’s Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk”: a trillion-parameter model with 49 billion parameters active per token, trained in its own European data centres. It’s available through an API preview today, with downloadable weights planned for October 27 after further training and safety testing.

Early results suggest true competitiveness in coding, cybersecurity and business automation. On DeepSWE v1.1, a software-engineering benchmark, Mistral reports:

Mistral Large 4 Preview: 62%
GLM-5.3: 61%
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813: 57%
Qwen 3.8 Max: 51%

These are preliminary results supplied by Mistral and not proof of superiority across every task. Still, they put a European-developed model alongside prominent Chinese competitors rather than far behind them.
However Europe isn't suddenly on top of the global benchmark. Mistral itself acknowledges that Large 4 narrows the gap with leading frontier models rather than completely closing it. And "open-weight" should not be confused with fully open-source: the weights aren’t downloadable yet.
The promising take: Kolibri and Large 4 show European companies are still building their own models, not merely reselling access to foreign ones. Once Large 4’s weights arrive, organisations should have another European-developed option to evaluate on infrastructure they controly.

Small reminder, you can still try Kolibri by Aleph Alpha for free and fully private on xprivo.com - Just switch to 'Kolibri' in the model selector in the chat.

What are your first thoughts on Mistral's "Le Chonk"? Does it show Europe is on the right track and catching up in the AI race?