Mistral promised a new sparse ‘fat’ model for early access this summer. But if you’ve been scouring Twitter—or should I say, X—you might have come across something entirely different. Enter the ‘Le Chaton Fat’ meme, a brainchild of the internet rather than Mistral itself, which led many on a wild AI goose chase.
The Details
The actual buzz around Mistral AI lately has been quite the soap opera of internet speculation. This meme, ‘Le Chaton Fat,’ promised an extravagant AI model boasting 24T-30T parameters and multi-modal capabilities. But don’t lose sleep over missing out—this effort was thoroughly debunked, leaving Mistral to sweep up the pieces of an unauthorized party.
While Mistral’s viral moment turned out to be a laugh, the company has not been all memes and empty promises. Their latest real model family, the Mistral 3, launched on December 2, 2025, features some serious tech muscle with its Mistral Large 3 model offering 675 billion parameters. It added a notable feather to Mistral’s cap in sparse mixture-of-experts architectures.
Background
