Strong disagree - a Mistral fine tune of llama 70b was the top performing llama fine tune. They have lots of data the community simply does not.
Maybe its just semantics, it is technically a finetune... But to me theres a big difference between expensive "continuation training" (like Solar 10.7B or Mistral 70B) and a much less intense finetuning. The former is almost like releasing a whole new base model.
It would be awesome if Mistral did that with their data, but thats very different than releasing a Gemma Instruct finetune.