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?

Has the French military advanced the state of the art on any dimension in the last hundred years?

And if not, why do they exist?

So that there exists an EU-native option in the near-frontier LLM space?

Not everyone is wild about being downstream of either the Chinese or US governments, particularly when it comes to things like cybersecurity

Just like Microsoft and most companies around PCs, their existence isn't about pushing any boundaries, but seemingly targeting deploying what's already been "invented" into the corporate world and bigger companies. Not "wrong", just different.

Mistral is one of the few European AI labs. Look up "sovereign AI".

Does erichocean ever advance the state of the art on any dimension?

And if not, why do they exist?