Mistral’s Le Chonk is now the top open model for coding
Mistral has released the weights for Large 4, along with some impressive Artificial Analysis scores.
Mistral has released the weights for Large 4, along with some impressive Artificial Analysis scores.
Welcome to AI Decoded , Fast Company ‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company , covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here . And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com , and fo…
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg : Game studio Gardens Interactive raised a $35M+ Series B led by Lightspeed at a pre-money valuation of $190M, taking its total funding to $71M — A studio led by the makers of the hit titles Sky: Children of the Light and Journey has raised $35 million in new funding to upend the viral …
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch : Healthleap, which makes AI screening software to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, raised $38M across a $30M Series A and an $8M seed — Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses …
Tim De Chant / TechCrunch : Parallel Systems, which builds autonomous freight trains, raised a $100M Series C led by AVP, taking its total funding to $200M+ — The railroad industry was one of the first to disrupt how the world worked with technology, but lately, innovation in freight railroading has amounted to little more than longer and longer trains.
Grace Kay / The Information : Elon Musk says Grok Bot will use the “best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno” — Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX's AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grok Bot, signaling a shift away …
Chris Welch / Bloomberg : Amazon's Ring unveils the $249 Ring Smart Lock, which uses a physical dial to recharge the battery when turned, set for a Q1 2027 launch, and five new cameras — Amazon.com Inc.'s Ring brand unveiled its first smart lock, with an innovative feature that addresses the dreaded scenario of arriving home to a dead battery.
As tensions mount over who gets access to top-end artificial intelligence , French company Mistral has released a new freely available model that it claims can compete with the very best from the US and China. The new 1 trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed Le Chonk—can be used and customized by anyone. It’s currently available in preview, with a final version to follow by the end of…
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch : Google launches SynthID Detector, a website that lets users detect AI-generated image, video, and audio media across dozens of common file formats — Google on Tuesday launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video or an audio clip, is generated using AI.
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal : Nous Research, which makes the open-source Hermes AI agent that has hit 22M+ downloads since February, raised $90M at a $1.2B valuation to expand to enterprises — The startup's Hermes tool has been downloaded more than 22 million times since February — Nous Research has raised $90 million …
Krystal Hu / Reuters : Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs invest $300M and the US invests $500M+ in Zuckerberg-backed Biohub to build open biology datasets for AI training — The US government and tech heavyweights Meta Platforms (META.O) and Google parent Alphabet are joining nonprofit Biohub …
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch : Flai, which makes AI tools for car dealerships to manage phone calls, emails, and texts, raised a $27M Series A led by Base10 Partners — When Flai was raising its seed round last year, it was just a team of three people pounding the pavement to get car dealerships to use the startup's software …
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal : Sources: AI neocloud Lambda is raising up to $4B led by Blackstone and Coatue at a pre-money valuation of $14.5B in a final round before its planned IPO — Blackstone and Coatue are leading the round, which values the cloud-computing startup at $14.5 billion pre-money
Olivia Moore / Andreessen Horowitz : A look at consumer AI trends: ChatGPT has 3x more US subscribers than Claude or Gemini, the top 1% of spenders drive 19.5% of spend, and AI agents gain traction — Three years into tracking consumer AI, the leaderboard is becoming familiar. This is the seventh edition of our Top 100 AI Consumer Apps …
Ryan Lawler / Axios : Navra, founded by SoFi and Figure co-founder Mike Cagney to make on-chain lending and securities markets more accessible, raised a $19M Series A led by Ribbit — Navra, the newest startup from SoFi and Figure co-founder Mike Cagney, has raised $19 million in Series A financing …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC : Anthropic expands its Claude Startups program, including up to $45K in discounts and credits via the Claude Startup Stack and a one-time $1,000 API credit — Anthropic on Tuesday announced it's expanding its Claude Startups program, the artificial intelligence lab's latest push to deepen …
Google : Google DeepMind launches EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M-parameter model to map code, images, video, and audio in a shared embedding space, under an Apache 2.0 license — EmbeddingGemma 2 is the most capable model for on-device multimodal embeddings, natively mapping combinations of text, images …
Max A. Cherney / Reuters : Vinci, which makes software used to simulate elements of chip and other hardware design, raised $250M at a $1.5B valuation — Software startup Vinci said on Tuesday it raised $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation and is seeking to expand its suite of software used to simulate elements of chip and other hardware design.
French AI lab Mistral AI has released Mistral Large 4, a new large multimodal model aiming to leapfrog both American and Chinese rivals.
Samantha Subin / CNBC : Anduril lands an up to $2.9B US Navy contract to make Virginia-class submarine components, days after Palmer Luckey was named to a DOD future weapons task force — Anduril won an up to $2.9 billion contract with the U.S. Navy on Tuesday to boost submarine production, days after co-founder Palmer Luckey …
With the release of its new trillion-parameter model, Mistral is hoping to demonstrate it’s “still in the race” to build frontier-level artificial intelligence.
Sabrina Ortiz / The Deep View : Mistral releases Mistral Large 4, dubbed “le Chonk”, a 1T-parameter open-weight model for general agentic capabilities, trained on 4,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs — Most flagship models dominating the market are from frontier labs and are closed models. French AI lab Mistral seeks to change that with its latest model.
Mistral has released a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1T model that the Paris-based company says is the most powerful open-weight AI system outside China. Starting today, developers can access it via Mistral’s API. The model weights, which enable anyone to download and run it on their own servers, will be available on October […] This story continues at The Next Web
Financial Times : UK retailer Asos falls 10%+ after customers received app notifications saying “we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance”; source: Asos is investigating — Shares in FTSE 250 retailer fall more than 10% following reports from mobile users
Reuters : Anthropic's IPO prospectus: Dario Amodei earned $18M in 2025, middle of the pack for tech CEOs, and President Daniela Amodei, his sister, earned $16.4M — Dario Amodei made $18 million last year as CEO of Claude AI developer Anthropic, the company's IPO filing shows, putting him in the middle ranks …
Reuters : Sources: the FBI removes an Accenture contractor over a breach exposing thousands of employees' data; the FBI says a contractor failed to apply a security patch — The Federal Bureau of Investigation removed an Accenture contractor on Monday over their role in a damaging data breach …
Seller claims to be offering Mistral AI's full source code and says the company was breached again after May 2026 attack Mistral says an investigation found no evidence of new unauthorized access but has not stated whether the listed code is genuine No customer data has surfaced in analyzed samples, and nobody has shown files created after the May incident A seller on a cybercrime forum says Frenc…
<img src="https://res.infoq.com/news/2026/09/gitlab-microsoft-foundry/en/headerimage/generatedHeaderImage-1789544515151.jpg"/><p>GitLab has expanded GitLab Duo Self-Hosted to support models deployed through Microsoft Foundry, letting organizations run GitLab's AI development capabilities against models hosted in their chosen Azure environment.</p> <i>By Craig Risi</i>
In the hope of uncovering new details about ancient life, researchers have developed a large language model that fills in the gaps in papyrus fragments.
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Yael Grauer / The Verge : Anthropic and other researchers detail how thousands of people were catfished by dating scam apps using LLM-generated replies from Claude and other models — Security researcher Matthew “Zigula” Gore-Kormanik was analyzing a fraudulent dating app called Dora when he got a pop-up message saying he was receiving a call from Jennifer.
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Reuters : Huawei plans to launch the Ascend 960DT AI chip in Q1 2027 and the 960PR in Q3 2027, and says its UnifiedBus tech is key to its next-generation large AI systems — Huawei Technologies (HWT.UL) will launch two new artificial-intelligence semiconductors in 2027, rotating chairman David Wang said on Thursday …
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Bloomberg : Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are among business leaders attending a White House state dinner for Xi Jinping next week; a source says Tim Cook will also attend — Apple Inc. Executive Chairman Tim Cook and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman are poised to attend a White House state dinner …
Financial Times : Sources: Emulate, a month-old UK AI startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in advanced talks to raise as much as $700M at a $3.7B valuation — Researchers leaving Big Tech group's London lab close to raising $700mn for new start-up Emulate
New York Times : In an unsealed court ruling, a US judge orders Google to make ad tech tools interoperable with rivals, share ad auction data, and appoint an internal monitor — The measures, which fall short of a breakup demanded by the government, effectively ensure that the tech titan's business will continue largely unscathed.
Wall Street Journal : Sources: Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk recently spoke with Trump and successfully stalled an AI regulatory plan proposed by Demis Hassabis — Senior administration officials have gathered almost daily in recent months to map out potential guardrails
Omar Abdel-Baqui / Wall Street Journal : AWS says it can't restore some data stored exclusively in data centers across Bahrain and one UAE availability zone after Iranian drone strikes in the spring — Amazon's announcement is the first indication that some data stored exclusively in Bahrain and the U.A.E could be gone forever
Michelle Ma / Bloomberg : Generac signs a long-term deal to supply Amazon with up to $8B worth of backup generators for data centers and grants Amazon a warrant for up to a 2.6% stake — Generac Holdings Inc. agreed to supply up to $8 billion worth of generators for Amazon.com Inc.'s data centers and issued a warrant …