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.
It's already superior to OpenAI because it doesn't require an API. You can run the model on your own hardware, in your own datacenter, and your data is guaranteed to remain confidential. Creating a one-off fine-tune is a different story than permanently joining your company at the hip to OpenAI.
I know in our bubble, in the era of Cloud, it's easy to send confidential company data to some random API on the Internet and not worry about it, but that's absolutely not the case for anyone in Healthcare, Government, or even normal companies that are security conscious. For them, OpenAI was never a valid consideration in the first place.
But the quality is not superior to OpenAI however. I run Mistral 7B on LM Studio, and I can't get far before it starts giving me wrong answers.
ChatGPT-4 on the other hand is correct most of the time (and knows to trigger Python code evaluation or RAG to answer questions). This makes it useful.