There is something to be said for this "most cheapest" approach, there is also something to be said for making models that are entirely ethically sourced:
1. Free of controversy like unlicensed training materials
2. Free of exploitative rlfh loops by people in low-wages countries
3. The leasons learned (and published) from going through the entire training process on "European" hardware: "AI factories" (the term for Slurm HPC/HTC systems with lots of heavy GPU nodes, heavily subsidized by our government [0])
1 and 2 are strong counter-LLM arguments at the moment, and hold back some groups of potential users. Another is energy/water use, so going for maximum green energy would be a nice boon as well. 3 is something I consider to be highly useful for our European identity and "way of the ninja" (for you Naruto fans out there).
one would also hope there'll be less pressure to "make line go up", i.e. not having to do attention-engineering via deliberate sycophancy to trap individuals into using it more and more and more and more and more and more.
but in general, yes, as someone who is vehemently anti-ai GPT-NL has piqued my interest specifically because of the ethical protections / measures they're talking about. question is whether they stick to it.