I've been thinking about sovereign AI a lot lately. About a year ago I was wondering what each country would be doing, and looking at places like e.g. Australia (which has pretty strict data residency laws for certain industries) - at that point I thought about advocating for why such countries should train their own models, but now I'm having a harder time justifying that point.

I can't see how any of these other countries could even approach the level of capability of the big three providers. I can imagine only a handful of countries who could even theoretically put enough resources towards reaching the SOTA frontier. Sure, even a model of capability level ~2024 has plenty of valid use cases today, but I'm concerned that people will just go with the big three because what they offer is still so so much better.

Not trying to discourage efforts like these, but is there really a good case for working on them? Or perhaps there's a state/national case, but it's harder for me to see a real business case.