And I have spent the last year building multiple ones.

While I can't claim to have tested everything, especially as we aren't going to change our stack every single week as something releases, I can speak for my recent knowledge of comparing Mistral small and Medium (their summer releases) with offerings from Google, OAI and Anthropic.

For our use cases, where little thinking is required and its mostly about gathering and transforming data Mistral offered the lowest cost per $. There is no single cloud out there that could compete on the cost per token or speed, bar Gemini flash.

We'll re evaluate and test in the future, but we're very satisfied in a way that only Gemini flash did for us before.

Plus, they are from EU and we're very glad to sustain an European business, we'll only consider alternatives if we need them or the current offering isn't competitive anymore, that's still not the case.

This just goes back to my original point: you don't feel pressure to keep up with all the solutions out there, and are ok taking what's good enough.

Mistral can bank on others doing the same, and I have no doubt they'll be able to get along doing so. They're not in the most competitive home market either, so I do think they'll stay at the front of "EU-native" foundation models.

But last week a Chinese delivery app casually chucked a model that's stronger than anything Mistral has ever released on HF (with an MIT license). When that's the competition, their current strategy is rough to say the least.