Do LLM providers with smaller / less capable LLMs still have a USP or will it be like what we witnessed in the search space, where the #1 company has more than 90% market share, #2 has less than 5% market share and everyone else less than 1%?
But at the moment Mistral seems to focus on smaller and efficient models that you can fine-tuned and run on your own infrastructure.
Mistral 7b was free but if they come up with larger capable models, they can offer them with a non-commercial free license and a sell a commercial license for companies that need to fine-tune it.
Looking at the performance of small fine-tuned models on specific tasks, I think most company will prefer taking that route rather than trusting OpenAI with their own data, the market is huge I think.
often that's a GDPR violation. there is not such thing as perfect data scrubbing.
EDIT: since I am retired and just obsess about LLMs and in general deep learning as a ‘gentleman scientist’ I hope Mistral has inexpensive non-commercial options for larger, more capable, and commercially supported models.
The revenue of Elastic Search is less than 0.5% of Google's revenue.