Le Chat, the cat-bot France has its AI hope on | Mint

One urgent question at the Summit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Paris this week was: Is Mistral AI’s assistant a cat, or a chat? Le chat called and developed by a French beginning as a participant in Chatgpt, was introduced as a smartphone app on February 6. For the English speaker, Le Chat looks like a French turn on AI chat doing it in English (and other languages). Still, Emmanuel Macron connected it to the Jamboree president with a soft ‘SH’, which made Le Chat clearly Feline. Arthur Mensch, the 32-year-old boss of Mistral, says his baby is indeed four-legged. Look carefully at the icon in the form of the letter M, he says: It is also a cat’s face. Days after it was introduced, Le Chat became the most downloaded iOS app in France. It is powered by cerebras, an American participant in Nvidia, and 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 questions about national security. France’s Defense Ministry, as well as Helsing, a German beginning focused on intelligent strike drones, signed transactions with Mistral. “There’s nothing like Le Chat nowhere else in Europe,” says Verity Harding, a British AI specialist. “If you download it,” Mr. Macron, “You help a European champion.” As always, it was a core message in Paris, although it was hampered by JD Vance, the Vice President of America, over regulation. The summaries promised technology that would be “safe, safe and reliable”; He accused world leaders of wanting to “strangle” AI. Nevertheless, France has revealed € 109 billion ($ 113 billion) in private, mostly foreign, AI investment in the coming years, and much of going on data centers that can use the country’s nuclear carbon core electricity. This boost for France’s AI sector is the £ 39bn ($ 49 billion) that Britain says it will spend on AI. For all his political misery, Mr. Macron strikingly touched, while he had foreign technological bosses and leaders about Foie Gras and Champagne in the Elysé Palace. Le Chat has a long way to go. It is little known, even in Europe. Mistral is a dwarf among American technical giants. But in Paris it made the AI ​​world talk. Ask Le Chat to explain the name Wittily and it shoots back: ‘A conversation batsman and a Purr-Fect marketing grip’. To stay on top of the largest European stories, you report to Café Europe, our weekly subscriber newsletter. © 2025, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Of The Economist, published under license. The original content can be found at www.economist.com first published: 17 Apr 2025, 05:06 IST