If you believe LLMs are going to end up built into everything and doing everything, from moderating social media to writing novels and history books, making such a model will be the most political thing that has ever happened.

If your country believes guns=bad nipples=good war=hell but you get your novels and history books written by an LLM trained by people who believe guns=good nipples=bad war=heroic it would be naive to expect the output to reflect your values and not theirs.

Even close allies of the US would be nervous to have such power in the hands of American multinational corporations alone - so the French state could be very eager for Mistral to produce a competitive product.

More or less; it was about as serious as your median Elon product tweet the last decade, or median coin nonsense.

Half-baked idea that obviously the models would need to be tuned for different languages / for specific knowledge, therefore countries would pay to do that.

There were many ideas like that, none of them panned out, hence the defenestration. All love for the guy, he did a very, very good thing. It's just meaningless to invoke it here, not only because it's completely off-topic, if anything that's already the play as the EU champion, and because the Stability gentleman was just thinking out loud, nothing more.