The €60 million in funding isn't much, though ten times more than what DeepSeek said they needed.
I suspect we're on a path where more and more American AI, as it embraces Orwellian police state/autocratic tendencies at home, will be outlawed in Europe.
If they could please outlaw foreign services from public institutions altogether, that would be great. Get rid of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple (MAGA), Facebook, and so on. The EU should be using opensource instead of all that proprietary shit.
Biggest oversight in history all that funding to us mega corps when EU could have been funding OS.
There is zero benefit for EU from these mega corps and entire planet can benefit from OS
Why not just put the money into Mistral? Mistral seems to be pretty cash-strapped and they're just about the only EU entity doing anything interesting with LLMs, and they've released open models before. Commissioning a bunch of models from them would be a better use of money than spreading it among a bunch of randos.
Why not just put the money into Mistral?
Because they are not, as Silicon Valley/American thinking would have it, trying to "win" some AI Arms Race measured in stock market valuations.
This is so European governments & their civil service, educational institutions, the EU itself has an AI untainted by either American or Chinese values, and also independent of either of them.
But Mistral could do all that, with a far lower chance of pissing away the money...