Why would anyone want to use Chinese tech is a mystery. There are too many geopolitical issues which makes it a risk. It is just not viable anymore to sign multimillion €$£ contracts with the companies originating from there. Scientific collab for sure but not more. I am not talking about toy applications here. Any significant deployment requires support etc from a provider. If data is very sensitive then doing confidential AI might be a better focus.

Competitive how? Is coding the only use case people talk about the best model?

Not even coding, in most stuff, Mistral models are as embarrassing as LLaMa, because they’re actually just LLaMa

That's very short-term. Whilst using whatever models now, Europe should be investing in catching-up before the inevitable future enshitification of the US models and the future political collision with both the US and China.

Enshittification and Political BS has already happened to Mistral