The question is not, will mistral be able to create the best models (seems bloody unlikely). The question is, will mistral have enough expertise to dominate its business use-case, which is the model infra/deployment market within the EU (which is more plausible, with even a 3rd, 4th, 5th best model development team).

Mistral just needs to good enough category think all those flash models or Qwen3.8 27b which they sadly aren't at the moment, that plus being European lab will mean that they will have very nice business. Even now these SOTA models feel too overkill for most tasks.

And GLM local models can eat Anthropic's lunch just like both eat OpenAI's.

Mistral's revenue is mostly B2B, and that's much more difficult to move.