There's this sentiment in Germany that if you can't make in industry, you work for the government or - even worse - become a politician. It seems like Mistral took that to the next level; they can't compete so they do lobbying instead.

Being European, I love the idea of European AI labs. But I wish there was more competition.

That being said, as a German for example, I can't think of an AI company successfully training a competitive foundation model here. The copyright mafia would take your investor's money before you could even finish the first training run (hyperbole.)

Nobody can compete with trillions of dollars of capital if it’s a race for capital.

they already pivoted to be the EUROPE ai cloud, this is just the natural consequences of cheerleading that

I like the sentiment. Keeps a lot of people out of politics so the few can rob everyone else blind. No no, you don’t want this job it’s for loser hacks only.

In that case, hopefully the copyright mafia will take the money from US and Chinese LLM companies and redistribute it to the people who did the actual work fueling the models, such as myself.

I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.

Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.

Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.