[Irishsteve]

I wouldn’t be surprised if the deal was somehow done via Microsoft and some contract they already have with the Norwegian government. This is how certain ms tech end up with the Irish government so quickly.

Mistral , open source etc do not have a sales force. Shame really

[sigmoid10]

Mistral models, in particular Mixtral 8x7, while free to download, are not "free" to run. Even if you have the necessary high end GPUs lying around unused (which is already highly unlikely to begin with), you still need to build and maintain a whole infrastructure around them. It would be extremely difficult to do this more cost effective per computed token than say OpenAI or any of the other big API providers.