Why would the Europeans want a high-quality open source model that isn't either owned by American Trillion-dollar companies or created by the Chinese? You really can't think of any reasons?
> that isn't owned
I don't know what definition of open weights you are using, but the "open" part is what allows you to use it without being beholden to American Trillion-dollar companies or the Chinese.
Mistral could do exactly what Cursor does, and post-train the model to meet the needs of Europeans.
That's a far more efficient (and useful!) use of GPUs than yet another pretrain on an outdated model backbone.
It's core to their whole value proposition that they are providing sovereign AI capabilities in Europe. If they're just repackaging Chinese models they don't really provide that sovereignty, and they'd be unable to justify their valuation or investments.
> they'd be unable to justify their valuation or investments
I don't think they're justified now, certainly their results don't justify it. Mistral is mid at best.
> It's core to their whole value proposition that they are providing sovereign AI capabilities in Europe.
Except they don't, they are dependent on GPUs from nVidia and AMD—both American companies.
It's the only place making open weight models close to competitive with American closed-weight models, and the only open-weight models that beat Mistral's models.
> I don't think they're justified now, certainly their results don't justify it. Mistral is mid at best.
Their investors and customers disagree.
> Except they don't, they are dependent on GPUs from nVidia and AMD—both American companies.
That's a pre-existing dependency that nobody in Europe is happy about. The goal with Mistral is to avoid there being yet another new layer of outside dependency. Mistral isn't a GPU company and isn't trying to be.
However, if someone in Europe was able to build a GPU that's as close to Nvidia or AMD as Mistral is to Anthropic or OpenAI, that company would also be seeing a lot of keen interest and likely piles of money.
Not once have I said "Mistral should not train models."
I have questioned doing yet another useless pretraining on a pre-existing, non-innovative model backbone.
Mistral spends their money and GPU time poorly, and the results demonstrate just that.