Even if it's not the best model, it can be really important step in UE sovereignty. Trained in EU, inference in EU. I guess it will matter for some companies. Hope Mistral won't disappear for the next half year.

For sure, as an EU based company we will only use US suppliers for coding but never for fuctions in our own products. Mistral knows this.

the greatest threat to Mistral is that there isn't a deep and large enough capital market in the EU to absorb the valuation step ups needed by the handful of EU sovereign growth investors to justify their existence.

you could say, that's perpetually a tomorrow problem, so long as they never go public, but that should illuminate for you: if everyone "knows this," it's inevitable that this so-called EU company, that didn't invent any of the AI, the hardware nor the training data, where their product is essentially more like a VPN provider than a frontier technology company, just lists and capitalizes in the US anyway.

Sovereignty over what though?

The last 3% of the stack? They’re essentially borrowing Chinese open source distillation/innovation off the US frontier running on US/Taiwanese designed chips and calling it EU made. This is better than nothing of course.

But is sovereignty really an end in itself? So the EU becomes IT independent…cool, then what? I mean the Yugo was sovereign, it didn’t do much good when the society itself failed to produce prosperity and collapsed.

It seems to me the EU is expending enormous effort on the appearance of “sovereignty” over what is ultimately…the last-mile consumer toilet paper purchasing conversation data…of an aging, increasingly irrelevant population on the political/economic stage.

Meanwhile domestically the entire economic model is failing and the “union” is getting shakey as its 2 biggest members turn more nationalist.

Maybe this “oh you cant compete but here’s a trophy for sovereignty” attitude isnt helping. Less clapping along with the EU bureaucracy’s latest make work projects like transitioning to a new Word processor. If we want the EU to succeed, more tough love is needed imo.