LightOn’s 2021 PAGnol is claimed to be the first LLM in French

A poster says LightOn made PAGnol in 2021 and calls it the first LLM in French. They say the 1.5B and 10B versions were made in Europe, and claim later models, including ModernBERT, have reached 70 million Hugging Face downloads in aggregate. The poster also says LightOn’s OCR was ahead of US and Chinese models when it came out.