Well, Models are hard to just distill down to a single benchmark number, or even a few across multiple different benchmark - they all behave and work slightly differently and you can find some who work or feel better for you and your use-case specifically.

But you're right, Mistral Large 4 seems a much more expensive but overall weaker model across the board.

The reason to use them would be, well, because they're...Mistral. They're in EU, france is large in nuclear energy so the energy cost of training has much less of an environmental impact, the data protection laws are very good in EU. This can really be a deciding factor for many EU companies, and I think it's good that they now have something which is at least semi-usable. (apparently)

It's also good that other options exist, even if they are worse. Deepseek is kind of like a large specter looming over every model release, because it's just SO cheap and good. That doesn't mean we should abandon every other model.

Still, the model is not really competitive on price and abilities alone. I'm mostly happy to see Mistral still in the fight.

If you're required to use a European model

Maybe not now, but in a few years, we might not need frontier models anymore. Open-weight models are only half a year behind the frontier, and both categories are advancing really fast.

Gemini 2.0 Flash, released just 1.5 years ago, could not even repeat a few paragraphs unchanged. Now, we have Mistral, DeepSeek, and MiMo.

if you care about data-retention policy or you have to use european models ...

Patriotism.