Mistral Mistral AI Released 2024-11 chattoolsmultilingual

Mistral Large

Mistral's flagship. Frontier-class quality with 128K context. Needs data-center GPU or 2-3x consumer GPU.

Best for frontier-tier chat on a single 96GB GPU
Sizes 123B
Context 128K
License MRL License
Min VRAM (default size, Q4) 70 GB
Rec VRAM 96 GB

What is Mistral Large?

Mistral Large is Mistral AI's open-weights language model. Released in 2024-11, it ships in 1 size (123B) and is licensed MRL License. The most popular use case is frontier-tier chat on a single 96GB GPU.

VRAM and hardware

The 123B size fits in 70 GB of VRAM.

Size Min VRAM (Q4_K_M) Recommended VRAM Tokens/sec on 3090
123B 70 GB 105 GB ~13 tok/s

How to run Mistral Large locally

Option 1: Ollama (simplest)

ollama pull mistral-large
ollama run mistral-large

Option 2: Mullama (production)

mullama pull mistral-large
mullama run mistral-large

Option 3: llama.cpp (CLI)

# Download a GGUF from Hugging Face (search "mistral-large gguf")
./llama-cli -m mistral-large.Q4_K_M.gguf -p "Hello, AI!"

Option 4: Python with Mullama or llama-cpp-python

from mullama import Model, Context
model = Model.load("mistral-large.Q4_K_M.gguf", n_gpu_layers=99)
ctx = Context(model, n_ctx=4096)
print(ctx.generate("Hello, AI!", 256))

What you can build with Mistral Large

  • frontier chat
  • tools
  • agentic
  • multilingual

Hardware it fits on

  • Apple Silicon (8GB): 123B in MLX
  • Apple Silicon (16GB): 123B in MLX
  • Apple Silicon (32GB): 123B in MLX or GGUF
  • Apple Silicon (64GB+): 123B in MLX
  • RTX 3090 (24GB): 123B at Q4_K_M
  • RTX 4090 (24GB): same as 3090, ~30% faster
  • RTX 5090 (32GB): 123B at Q8_0
  • 2× RTX 6000 Ada (96GB total): 123B at Q4_K_M

Related models in the Mistral family

  • Mistral — 7B · legacy 7B chat, very low resource
  • Mistral Nemo — 12B · 12B class chat with 128K context
  • Mistral Small — 22B, 24B · sub-30B quality on consumer hardware

Other models you might consider

  • Llama 3.1 (Meta) — 8B, general-purpose chat, agentic workflows, code
  • Llama 3.2 (Meta) — 1B, low-end hardware, mobile, edge deployment
  • Llama 3.2 Vision (Meta) — 11B, vision + chat on desktop GPUs
  • Llama 3.3 (Meta) — 70B, best-in-class 70B for desktops
  • Llama 4 (Meta) — Scout 17B (109B MoE), vision + long context (10M tokens)
  • Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba) — 0.5B, strongest 7B-32B on consumer hardware