Mistral has a huge advantage that will shine later... it's a EU-based company. We are already seeing signs of digital sovereignity everywhere. The clients will flock to them, I dare to say government will be even enforcing clients to contract Mistral. So actually being the top dog in benchmarks matters less, than having secure servers and datacenters which are physically based in Europe.
Artificial intelligence is only as useful as its intelligence. A dumb model provides no value to anybody.
Flock to a dumb model? - doubt it. Forced by the EU? - i can see it happen, sadly.