On Wednesday, Arthur Mensch took his seat at a G7 working lunch in Evian alongside Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei. Days earlier, the US government had ordered Amodei’s company to cut foreign nationals off from its most capable models, and Anthropic had pulled them worldwide.
For the one European founder at the table, the timing could hardly have been better.
Mensch, the chief executive of Mistral, has spent two years warning that this exact thing could happen. Now it has, and the internet has turned his argument into a joke about a very large cat.
The fat cat that ate the discourse
The joke is ‘Le Chaton Fat’, a fictional Mistral ‘frontier model’ that tech circles cannot stop posting about. It does not exist. As the French outlet Numerama confirmed, it is an elaborate running gag that started on Mistral’s subreddit after the company rebranded its Le Chat chatbot as Vibe, a name change users hated.
