For a post to make such a big deal about sovereignty it is a bit misleading to not mention that the company is slated to be merged with Cohere, a Canadian company.
And that is a good thing - no need to hide it. Given the growing cost of keeping up, these few non-US, non-Chinese companies really need to do more sharing of efforts and costs.
Canada too is very much in need of sovereign AI options, but funding that on its own would be pretty much a waste of money. Would love to see this new German Canadian company cooperate with Mistral too, or maybe one of the Korean AI companies.
Given that "sovereign" these days implicitly means independence from USA and China, and Canada being spiritually in the same boat as the EU, it's pretty spot on?
The costs of "keeping up" aren't really growing, on the contrary.
I also read about Canada maybe joining the EU in some capacity, although I'm not sure if that was a joke. Eurovision could be a start.
Ursula von der Leyen (president of european commission) propsed an "associated membership" with EU. Such an association is not defined anywhere in EU contracts yet. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/commentary/eus-first-...
Hey there, I worked on Kolibri pre-training data. Agree with the point that non-US/non-Chinese labs need to pool effort. The merger with Cohere is public, nothing to hide and I'm also excited about it personally.