This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government ... The EU was build on the principles of collaboration ... But this only works if it is reciprocal.
This sounds great but doesn't really make any sense. What skeptics are saying is there should be a pan-EU effort to build frontier models, rather than one-off toy models built by each country as a box-ticking exercise.
"We built the EU as a powerful supranational organization, so logically the EU's response to a great power challenge in the realm that may well define the 21st century is gonna be to shatter its efforts into 27 useless pieces, because Trump bad" is just absolutely ridiculous and will not lead to anything good. Be the change you want to see, etc.
Look I agree with all you said. The EU should do this but the EU is also structurally bad at large concerted efforts exactly because it is a collaboration mechanism, not a super state.
Whatever topic comes up on this board, if the EU is mentioned people go a bit cray-cray.
If an individual country trains a language model, it's not ambitious enough. If we try to do one for the whole EU they will say it takes too long (you need to get all countries on board, you see). If the EU announces it by executive decision it's a dictatorship and government driven economic intervention, if a EU company does it they'll say it's not good enough.
You can't win with these people. In my opinion, you shouldn't even try to convince them.