One pressing question at the artificial-intelligence (AI) summit in Paris this week was this: is Mistral AI’s assistant a cat, or a chat? Called Le Chat and developed by a French startup as a competitor to ChatGPT, it launched as a smartphone app on February 6th. To the English speaker, Le Chat looks like a French twist on AI chat, which it conducts in English (and other languages). Yet at the jamboree President Emmanuel Macron plugged it using a soft “sh”, rendering Le Chat distinctly feline. Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s 32-year-old boss, says his baby is indeed four-legged. Look carefully at the icon in the shape of the letter M, he says: it is also a cat’s face.
Days after it launched, Le Chat became the most-downloaded iOS app in France. Powered by chips from Cerebras, an American competitor to Nvidia, it is much faster to use than other AI assistants, including ChatGPT. Like China’s DeepSeek, it uses open-source models; but unlike the Chinese AI assistant, Le Chat does not raise national-security questions. France’s defence ministry, as well as Helsing, a German startup focused on intelligent strike drones, have signed deals with Mistral. “There’s nothing like Le Chat anywhere else in Europe,” says Verity Harding, a British AI specialist. “When you download it,” declared Mr Macron, “you are helping a European champion.”
As ever, trying to build champions was a core message in Paris, though one that was marred by a spat with J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, over regulation. The summiteers promised technology that would be “safe, secure and trustworthy”; he accused world leaders of wanting to “strangle” AI.
All the same, France unveiled €109bn ($113bn) in private, mostly foreign, AI investment over the coming years, much of it to go on data centres that can make use of the country’s low-carbon nuclear electricity. This boost to France’s AI sector well exceeds the £39bn ($49bn) that Britain says it will spend on AI. For all his political woes, Mr Macron was strikingly chirpy as he cajoled foreign tech bosses and leaders over foie gras and champagne at the Elysée Palace.
Le Chat has a long way to go. It is little known, even in Europe. Mistral is a dwarf among American tech giants. But in Paris it got the AI world talking. Ask Le Chat to explain its name wittily and it shoots back: “a conversation starter and a purr-fect marketing coup”.
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