If open weight models are the future, U.S. AI companies are going to have a hard time
(www.fastcompany.com)
Mistral is still around, but for local LLMs... they're kinda irrelevant, sadly. Their models have regressed. I think they're being choked by ambiguous EU law.
If you're looking for "western" weights, I'd look at the Laguna series first:
https://huggingface.co/poolside
And ik_llama.cpp quantizations like this: https://huggingface.co/sigargv/Laguna-M.1-GGUF/tree/main
There's a couple of other interesting startups, but TBH its hard to keep track of where they're from.