> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.

It’s an interesting contrast that you claim that the USA does not equate to its current political situation, whereas conversely the EU is ‘rotting’ from the inside. Do you think this is a balanced and reasonable claim?

There will always be a place for domestically sourced AI I think. Even if Mistral models suck theyll get enough defense revenue that they wont go out of business