It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I am just pointing out why it’s hard to catch up to scaling laws given the European economic (capital) and political (US would be upset if they found out Europeans distill) constraints. China is only bound by economic constraints.

> This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.

For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably.

For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that.

And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.