January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.
News / mistral
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1 min read
How to Tell a Frontier Model From a Fat Kitten
Read more . . . →Before you reshare the next screenshot of a “frontier model,” run it through the Le Chaton Fat test. Is there a real model card or product page, or just a screenshot of a chart? Can you actually call it — open weights to download, or an API key that works? Is the benchmark published and reproducible, or is the “leaderboard” one image somebody made in an afternoon? Le Chaton Fat failed all three: no weights, no API, no model card, and the only leaderboard it ever topped was a parody chart bragging about a croissant context window and 1,000 meows...
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1 min read
The Fake Cat Nobody Could Switch Off
Read more . . . →On Friday June 12, at 5:21pm ET, the US government handed Anthropic an export-control directive: cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere, in the country or out, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national staff. You can’t check the passport of hundreds of millions of users in real time, so Anthropic did the only compliant thing and pulled both models for everybody. Its statement pinned it on “the US government, citing national security authorities.” NBC named Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Bureau of Industry and Security; Bloomberg later published the letter. Anthropic says it disagrees and chalks...
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1 min read
The Fat Kitten That Fooled the Whole Timeline
Read more . . . →In late May, Mistral renamed its chatbot Le Chat — French for “the cat” — to “Vibe.” The fans mourning the cat did what the grieving do online: they built a replacement. Le Chaton Fat. Franglais for “the fat kitten,” an oxymoron with a face. It started in Mistral’s own community, hit X around June 11, and within hours actual machine-learning researchers were asking out loud if it was real. Cody Blakeney posted, dead serious, “Can someone tell me if Le Chaton fat is real or an amazingly elaborate joke?” No weights. No API. No model card. It never hit...
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