> lack of European competitors
There's Mistral. Although they've been surprisingly quiet for the last 6 months.
> There's Mistral
Mistral: eq.IQ ~70
Kimi, Claude, Grok, Gpt, Gemini: eq.IQ ~130+
France might do something mad and take that route, but EU wide ain't happening for Mistrals sake.
They are profitable and active on the enterprise local model territory. You can RL a model with them for your own purposes and I heard good things about it.