Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Mistral leads an aggregate leaderboard. As of 18 June 2026, Mistral Large 3 sits at the top of the "best Mistral models" view of the BenchLM aggregate leaderboard with an aggregate score of 48, driven by strong multimodal (67) and maths (65) sub-scores. The model itself is not new — the standing is. Large 3 was released on 2 December 2025 as part of the Mistral 3 family. The timely story is its leaderboard position in mid-June 2026, which underlines its standing as the credible European open-source option. It is genuinely open-source. Large 3 is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 41 billion active and 675 billion total parameters, released under the Apache 2.0 licence — permissive open source as well as open weights. On LMArena it ranks #2 in the OSS non-…
