Hard to see how can Mistral compete with Meta, they have order of magnitude less compute, their models are only slightly better (at least on the benchmarks) with less permissive licenses?
Yeah, the license thing is definitely a problem. It's hard to get excited about an academic research license for a 3B or 8B model when the Llama 3.1 and 3.2 models are SO good, and are licensed for commercial usage.
to be clear- these ministal model are also licensed for commercial use, but not freely licensed for commercial use. and meta also has restrictions on commercial use (have to put “Built with Meta Llama 3” and need to pay meta if you exceed 700 million monthly users)