I think the adage about "a solution needs to be 10x other solutions to make someone switch" applies here.
Saying something performs slightly better than the industry standard offerings (OpenAI) means that OpenAI is going to laugh all the way to the bank. Everyone will just use their APIs over anything else.
I'm excited about the LLM space and I can barely keep up with the model names, much less all the techniques for fine tuning. A customer is going to have an even worse time.
No one will ever get fired for buying OpenAI (now that IBM is dead, and probably sad Watson never made a dent).
I do use Mistral for all my personal projects but I'm not sure that is going to have the same effect on the industry as open source software did in the past.
We are beseiged by vendors promising the earth from their amazing AI tools and we peel back 1 surface layer and they are just shoving things wholesale into GPT-4. When I ask "can we please deploy this on a local model" they run off scared. I can't get any vendor to give us anything except OpenAI.