By the LLM Gateway timeline's count, six new models arrived between October 2 and October 7: Ling 3.1 Flash from inclusionAI, HY Image 3.5 Preview from Tencent Cloud, Mistral Large 4, Gemini Nano Banana 2.1, Claude Haiku 5.5, and GLM 5.3 Fast from Z.AI. Add GPT-6 in ChatGPT and it was one of the busiest release weeks of the year.

Mistral Large 4

Mistral Large 4 launched in public preview on October 6. Reports describe it as a mixture-of-experts model with about 1.05 trillion total parameters, 52 billion active per token, a one-million-token context window, and image input. Mistral labels it open-weight, but as of October 8 the weights are not downloadable; coverage citing VentureBeat puts the release on October 27 under a custom Mistral licence whose terms have not been detailed.

Preview pricing is reported at half the list rate: $0.68 per million input tokens and $2.09 per million output tokens, versus $1.36 and $4.18 at list.

The practical question

DiscussDoes promised-later weights meet your self-hosting bar? Tell the thread where your line is.

For teams with a self-hosting mandate, "open" increasingly means a spectrum: published weights, a licence you can actually read, and a release date that has already happened. Large 4 currently checks none of the three. That is not a criticism of the model, which benchmarks well in early reports, but it is a reason to keep the procurement conversation precise.