Mistral are mostly focusing on b2b, and for customers that want to self-host (banks and stuff). So their founders being from Meta, or where their cloud platform are hosted, are entirely irrelevant to the story.
The fact they would not exist without the leeches and built their business on the leeches is irrelevant.
Pan-nationalism is a hell of a drug: a company that does not know you exist puts out an objectively awful release, and people take frank discussion of it as a personal slight.
Those who crawled the web without consent, and then put their LLM in a blackbox without attribution, with secret prompt and secret weights -- ie. all of this without giving back, while creating tons of Co2. Those are the leeches.
Ah, so "crawled the web without consent, and then put their LLM in a blackbox without attribution" is not being a leech once you release the weights of an underperforming model using someone else's arch.
At the very least it is a step in the right direction. Can't say the same for these proprietary models. And guess which country has all these proprietary models? USA.
