French AI company Mistral has released its latest model, officially called Large 4 and nicknamed “Le chonk” in reference to an internet joke about overweight cats. The company says it is the largest and most powerful AI model it has released so far. Artificial-intelligence experts described Mistral as a European competitor to American and Chinese companies, while noting that Anthropic and OpenAI are still generally seen as offering the most powerful models and that Mistral has tended to follow them by several months.