Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.

China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.