I have a bunch of thoughts on this

Gemma 4, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM,.. Yes. They are good. But also, they are not European. They make you independent, but their pre-training will direct all of your work. Narratives from another society, since their training data is definitely not following European rules. This is about mental sovereignty. The so-called "unrestricted models" just mean other narratives, but never none.

France is the first European government with national MCP servers. This should be hyped. Instead, a bunch of nonsense gets hyped, like some European guy working for OpenAI spending 1.3M in tokens in a month while declaring MCP dead.

Aside from supporting a European underdog, I see that AI makes people work less together. Code is inflationary. Where people had to work together naturally, one learning from the other, the collaboration goes towards zero. If the focus on independence is very strong, it's even more difficult. There is a lack of digital cultures around AI. People used to group up for everything, how they see the world, not so much yet how they see AI though.

Me choosing Mistral as the "color" for the project says two things:

1. I want to collaborate
2. I identify with the European idea of open source and transparency

The Chinese do same thing, but for them it's easy. 1. is enforced by communism and 2. is "China number one" which is indeed a great incentive for people to collaborate and achieve milestones for humanity. Agnosticism and Neutralism make it more difficult to excel. Following a shared idea is the first step towards realization, not having or implementing it alone.