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

Mistral AI was founded in 2023 and quickly made a name for itself in the specialized realm of open-weight AI models. Mistral is sharpening real-world plans to secure roughly €3 billion in funding on a quest to hit a €20 billion valuation.

Its last sparse MoE model, the Mixtral 8x7B, deployed in 2023, included 46.7 billion total parameters. Mistral’s annualized revenue is approaching $400 million.

What This Means for Investors

The fervor generated from a non-existent product underscores the volatility in the AI space where speculation often treads on solid investment groundwork. The meme gained significant traction on Reddit, X, and AI forums from June 14–16, 2026, before being debunked. Investors might want to keep a keen eye out for authentic announcements rather than getting swayed by chats in internet forums.