The announcement was at the International Open-Source LLM Builders Summit held this week in Switzerland. Is it so strange that they announced what they are doing and the timeline?

The cliché (at least on my side of the Alps) is that people in Switzerland like to take theiiiir tiiiime.

Funding? Deeply biasing European uses to publicly-developed European LLMs (or at least not American or Chinese ones) would make a lot of sense. (Potentially too much sense for Brussels.)