In brief Mistral Medium 3.5 is a 128 billion parameter dense model priced at $1.50 input / $7.50 output per million tokens, far above comparable Chinese alternatives. Chinese open-source models—Qwen, GLM, MiMo-V2—dominate the leaderboard top, leaving Mistral as a lonely Western holdout. Mistral is positioning the release as a building block toward a future large flagship model. Mistral AI dropped Mistral Medium 3.5 on April 29. The Paris-based lab announced a dense 128-billion-parameter model, a set of agentic features—and walked straight into a wall of online “meh” reactions.The release came in three parts. First, the model itself. Second, remote coding...