As an opesource AI researcher with a lot of models and datasets on huggingface I am very appreciative of these types of project but we are ignoring the elephant in the room here ( or lack of )
the swiss have no gpus
the swiss have no gpus
I can run the 8B version of this swiss-ai model on a ten year old GPU. For the larger one, $2000 consumer hardware can run it fine. Beyond that, there are plenty of places where time on a GPU can be rented, and if the model is good, there will be hardware to run it.
My charitable reading of GP's point is that the bottleneck for true compute sovereignty is the chips, not the models.