You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition (and thus not worth throwing subsidies at, because any economic advantage is fleeting at best).
Looking at the data and related past experience, this looks like a pretty solid bet (despite the "risk" being hard to quantify).
And that's a bet they will lose 100%. Once the Chinese starts imposing export bans/controlling the access to their models, Europe would be at the mercy of US/China to allow them access or just rely on miserable mistral
There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven assumption, and "automatically" negates your lead over time.
Similarly, purely "intellectual" advantage in disciplines like cryptography/computer chess/algorithm design never really stayed concentrated, either.
To take a simple example, look at the progress of technology over the last ~500 years - it seems to me that the rate of change continues to accelerate despite many of the logistic curves flattening along the way.
There are still huge unanswered questions about whether or not the stacking sigmoids will favor the incumbents. But I would not definitively bet against the people with the most compute data, talent and money.
I'd argue that a lot of important technologies (like circuit design!) started at basically zero in the last century, and the progress was actually exponential for a significant time (=> because we started so low on the curve).
But if you reduce things to a single metric (wealth per person? total energy available to humanity? global industrial/construction output in tons?) I can't think of anything where such "stacking" successful subverted the sigmoid trend (or looks like it will, long-term).
One of the best example is nuclear reactors. By now the know how and technology is fairly mature and open, but not every country gets to build nuclear reactors. Same would be with the frontier models as well.
EU should have already started investing in the infrastructure side in-case they obtain the know how, but your politicians are still bickering on pension reforms and Ukrainian war, etc.
They can just operate and provide normal access to their services, just block AI access. This is already happening, apple would not release new Siri in EU (granted it's due to a regulation clash) but this would be a testing point.
If Europeans are still paying the same prices for sub par services/products to their American counter parts, it's win-win situation for those companies. Just sell a dumbed down non-AI version of service/product in EU for an inflated price.
A not-insignificant portion of the AI/ML research community is in the EU.
Regarding the open weights, I don’t see meta doing that for their future models, especially once they have their own frontier models. Open weight models are kinda marketing strategy where they use it as a bait and switch. A lot of Chinese companies became popular with their open wight models and once they build that reputation they have no incentive to keep on releasing new open weighted models
Also meta could just take the best mind in EU research centres to US with millions of dollars as yearly payments
The goal is to triple the number of data centers over the next years. It is not like there is nothing going on...
So basically EU will be left behind unless we start doing something about it now. imo Mistral isn't enough by itself.
I mean we can barely get EU to host with EU providers. Nevermind something so speculative.
What happened to China because they were third movers in the race to the nuclear weapons? Nothing. They were pretty behind for a while technologically. The wheels have turned. Stop looking at the world as a short strategy game match, or like a Hollywood movie where everything is all-or-nothing. Many parts of south America are way behind in IT, automotive, space, yet many people have meaningful and happy lives there.
I'm yet to accept that the power-block I'm living within being first in the AI race provides a meaningful life to me.
In the US the federal government has much more power but nobody is attributing the term good fortunes of the AI industry to the recent federal policy there. (There's long term stuff that does make a difference in hoovering up the global R&D talent and concentrating capital, but that's a different kettle)
EU budget is about 1% of the GDP of the countries (from https://commission.europa.eu/topics/budget_en)
There's very little betting on any particular AI models going on by the commission/EP. The Pleias article claims a 2020 eurocrat whitepaper determined how things go, but that's fantastical.