The problem with the European independence story is, that it seems Mistral runs its own stuff also on US cloud act affected infrastructure. This makes them a very weird value proposition: If I accept a level of "independence" whereby I run on AWS or Azure, I could as well pay for Anthropic or GPT to have SOTA performance.

If I do not accept that level of independence but want more, I need to buy what's on OVH, Scaleway, Ionos etc. or host my own, but that usually means even smaller, worse models or a lot of investment.

Nevertheless, the "band" that Mistral occupies for economic success is very narrow. Basically just people who need independence "on paper" but not really. Because if I'm searching for actual independence, there's no way I could give them money at the moment for one of their products and it making sense, cause none of their plans are an actual independence-improvement over, let's say, Amazon Bedrock.

I really really want to support them, but it must make economic sense for my company, too, and it doesn't.

I really hope you're right. Sadly, though, I don't see any evidence of UK companies disinvesting from big US tech. There aren't good alternatives and what there is is too complex. As long as 'everyone else is still using MS', it seems like it's a brave CTO that switches to European providers. Unless that happens, the network effect of having AI+data is likely to mean US tech still has a big advantage in corp settings. But, HN - please tell me I'm wrong!

they will, but the jagged frontier is fractal and each one will have different capabilities; you'll want to mix models and to get best results consistently you'll need to.