LLMs are rapidly becoming the first 'purely digital commodity'.

Being digital it's somewhat hard to apply any kind of trade protectionism or Chicken Tax onto them. Maybe there's a market for cruelty-free vegan non-GMO (low-water-use sustainable energy) LLM tokens as well as European ones?

I really like what Mistral did for open Models - but what is the plan to compete against the likes of Moonshot, DeepSeek in the global market? When you can get Kimi K2.6 served via cloudflare it raises tough questions on the economics of it all.

What exactly is Mistral's strategy is aside from niche regulatory requirements or a Eurocentric hedge for AI sovereignty? Do they even have ambitions to compete on the global stage?

I don't know their strategy but I wish they would double up on the open source ecosystem by sharing their innovations like Chinese labs do and use the ones shared as well. I think models in the range of 50B - 250B still have a lot of room to grow and presumably compute to train them should be more accessible than multi-T parameter models.

This would also add pressure on other labs to keep being engaged in the open source ecosystem as a rug pull isn't a small danger IMO.

Interesting that you mention commodity, because the better AI models become the more fungible they are. AI companies become like web hosting companies renting out server space with good enough open models. It’s not like Excel that runs the world economy because people don’t want to learn anything else.