There would be a bunch of value in having, say, a good 30B-class model that used my local language as well as it does English. There's lots of cases, especially in the government sphere, where local processing is a requirement and frontier-level capabilities aren't required. Making those cheap to run seems like a fine goal.
Yes, but what's the point of a support bot that writes good Dutch when it can't follow instructions, doesn't understand the questions or can't solve problems? I might be wrong, but I don't think atm these models have the cognitive ability to perform any task in a satisfactory manner.
As for accessing pii, I imagine the value here is in the fact they're local, which has nothing to do with the "sovereignty" of these models. If anything, a model is more likely to be tricked by a malicious prompt the farther it is from the sota.
A good harness and engineering is important no matter which model you use.
But Sovereignty of hosting is also important because without it all pii is being leaked.
