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.