Mistral has a different focus. They aren't taking on trillions in debt risking their entire economy to produce useful products.

I think they are leaders in the democratization of LLMs. Almost everyone has a computer right now that can run a useful variant of a Mistral model. I hope they keep their focus because what they are aiming for likely has the biggest impact on the average person and would be the best case scenario for the technology in general.

There are no European models that come close. It's Korean models, then a UAE model K2, then Mistral.

AFAIK: Current Mistral models are not competitive with SOTA-models that come out of the USA or China. They are "good enough" for enterprise usage when you don't need SOTA performance.

Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.

They arent. Benchmark wise they are quite apart.