to be fair, there is no plausible explanation for Mistral's fall into irrelevance other than having to deal with regulatory burden. US and CN labs get to feed their models all the data in the world while Mistral has to comply with Let's-Smother-The-AI-Baby-In-The-Crib-To-Maybe-Prevent-It-From-Maybe-Becoming-A-Criminal Act that EU nepo babies had expedited as soon as AI became the current thing.

Mistral had open-weights SOTA when Chinese labs had no noteworthy LLMs at all, and now even its closed-weights offerings are behind half a hundred Chinese models -- most of them from labs with way less funding -- despite having had unhindered access to Nvidia hardware all this time.