It's the only non-Chinese open weights frontier model, so while not groundbreaking per se, still quite important.
Important for sovereignty, multi-language support, and choice.
There are many non-Chinese open weights models, just not very good ones.
Inkling!
You have a number of other European providers of open-weight LLMs, such as Bielik and Aleph Alpha. They are not trying to compete at the frontier, but they sometimes develop original architectures. I am also a big fan of PleIAs' research in this regard, have a look at their Baguettotron