TNO doesn't serve nor represent global interest and hence does not care about global progress. It exists to enhance knowledge on things within Dutch society primarily with some ripple effect outward to EU because they have interests within the EU.

Its purpose is not to become some kind of OpenAI or global foundation offering services/tools on that scale.

There is a lot of critisism on this project, not invalid, but mostly based in lack of understanding of what the goals are of the organization as well as the people building the thing.

The people building it, are well aware of how it will be less capable than other LLMs on a general reasoning aspect, not only due to having actually purchased _all_ licensed data that has been used as inputs. Not being a multi billion dollar corporation, this means having very little data and should be an obvious signal to observers that it has not the goal to outdo other models.

In my opinion (personal) its a project that has a learning and demonstration value that is not 'look how well our model performs against others', but still offers value.