A Berlin-based search engine switched from a US provider to a French language model in spring and replaced it again in autumn. The reasons given are outages, a performance gap and costs. Freely available models are now used instead, including some from China.
Regardless of how one judges this choice, the case shows that sovereignty depends less on where a model comes from than on the ability to exchange it. A new initiative of the Eclipse Foundation puts it in similar terms.
We advise companies to place their own intermediate layer between application and model, to maintain a small set of real test cases and to keep the instructions given to the model under version control. This makes it possible to evaluate any new offering quickly without rebuilding the application.