I mean, Mistral AI is a Paris-based company, and theirs was considered on par or better than other open weight models such as llama3.1 and qwen2.5, and mistral-

I mean, Mistral AI is a Paris-based company, and theirs was considered on par or better than other open weight models such as llama3.1 and qwen2.5, and mistral-24b is currently beating oh-so-great gemma3-27b depending on tasks. Also, Stable Diffusion was originally (and still is I believe) developed in Munich. It's true though that raising capital and finding investors works wayyy better in the US (kindof needless to say on HN) and so was getting top talent - at least in the past. Don't get me started on energy prices ;) but I don't believe those contribute significantly in the end anyway.