Qwen models have solid performance on benchmarks and we're transparent about this in the report. We're just happy to share a European alternative in the small model space, where I don't think we can afford to be fully dependent on China. We also put a lot of effort into German language quality things that don't show up in evals at all (style, Grammar, German reasoning, etc).
Sovereignty is imho mostly about choice and control over your data. Cohere is no different on that front and personally I'm quite excited about what we will build together post-merger.
I’m most familiar with Canada, where sovereign is usually just an excuse to overpay someone connected for an inferior product with no strategic value.
The main problems with big corp AI are due to control of access in the first place and control of what they output.
When you make your industry reliant on such choke points, you render yourself the opposite of "sovereign" for sure. Having multiple independent suppliers at least mediates that.
What's so "not-sovereign" for an open-weights American or an open-weight-open-training-process Chinese LLM?
Do we also need sovereign Linux (maybe), sovereign Postgres (most likely not), sovereign Python (def not)?
Given your other comments I can see why it was banned.