> which seems to be mistrals whole thing

They got a lot of hate for not keeping up with frontier model releases, but have managed to carve out a nice business that isn't even really niche.

Before the datacenter deals their revenue was higher than xAI's

There is a whole world out there of purpose built and hosted task specific vertical llms - especially with an emphasis on cost.

Mistral, Microsoft model releases and Thinking Machines are all over this, and it's smart. Scoop up all the tasks that don't require large and expensive frontier general-purpose llms.