"quantum algorithms" that would put them directly on a blacklist if I had one. They might as well directly promote their stuff with Cold Fusion and Snake Oil.

> I wouldn't be surprised if these guys just finetuned an open Chinese model and called it a day.

Easy enough to find out, ask it a whole bunch of questions about politically sensitive things that would be impossible to publish on CCTV, the Peoples Daily, CGTN, etc. If they didn't train the model and just fine tuned it, a lot of "don't talk about Tibet or the Dalai Lama or what happened in 1989" will be perma baked into it.

They had other models a while ago, named 'Pulsar', and they were finetunes of Nemotron in collaboration with NVIDIA. I think this will be something similar.

looks like someone is looking for EU funding :D

That made me laugh out loud

I understood from informal chatter that researchers in the top Chinese labs are pretty open with sharing knowledge with each other. Additionally, it seems that anywhere between 30-50% of key researchers in the top US labs are ethnically Chinese. I wonder if this situation might give Chinese labs/researches some advantage just due to language and informal networks. Chinese researchers can understand all the English research, but research in Chinese is far less accessible to non-Chinese.

> That's a niche which exists

It's not a small niche. Anything touching European resident personal data must only be done by Euro AI Act compliant AIs. So, hosted in Europe at least (unclear to me rn, would love to learn the exact criteria).

It is surprising given how many parameters it has that it scores so low. But, hopefully this will build up domestic talent and understanding and let Europe compete on the world stage with this.

i mean qwen3.8 is a technical marvel

As a non-European, I care. I definitely want choice in this matter, as too many things can be baked into models that we can't really know until it comes up.

For instance, I heard one of the Chinese models has some interesting "history" "facts" built into it. That's major, and can influence a lot more than just asking it for that particular history lesson.

I don't want just 1 LLM. I want a great LLM from every major region. I will probably still prefer my own region, but I still want the others to be an option.

As a European, I do. I don’t envy the state that has to buy all its water and food from its aggressive, militarized neighbour.

As a European: I do, because I'm not oblivious to geopolitics or digital sovereignty.

I hope you're aware that it's likley in the future open weight models will output tokens/commands that aren't in your interest. It could be that models are trained with spionage in mind and models could only target specific input token patterns, time zones, ip addresses, names etc... You will be able to see the output tokens but things will become so complex that you won't notice its intentions. Maybe there will be some sort of output token scanning software/llm (let's call it a modern form of a virus scanner) that validates intentions. In the end, I'm just trying to say that open weight means you have a black box in front of you that you don't know what it does. Therefore, the training material of open weight models should be known. While it doesn't matter where the model comes from, it certainly matters whether you trust those people if you don't have the training material.

The problem is always the next model, or the one after. If china thinks it's beneficial to stop open weight releases, it will stop them. Then you are stranded on that one and no local industry to produce new models for you.

I do care, because those models can contain backdoors and 'open weight' models can require specialized hardware to run in the future.

It's more important to have ownership into them, they're turning into powerfull tools that we have already seen cut off in the private sector on a whim. Having our own that is comparable (this is a nice first step) is better than Alibaba for example just not releasing the rest.

As with all of the EU's dependancies on Tech with the US, the idea of "I don't care where my DNS servers are" is starting to be an oversight.

But thanks for your opinion.

Issue is that it is extremely hard to notice if there is backdoor or some training-related hallucinations that are completely random.

E.g. I had random, completely unrelated and irrelevant fetch by Qwen3.8 27B to " https://routify-file-proxy-sg.oss-ap-southeast-1.aliyuncs.co..." and I only noticed it because I have allowlist rules for what they can do.

yeah digital infrastructure is more achievable, more important and can produce revenue more reliably compared to AI.

if sovereignty is the goal, drop Microsoft, aws and adapt / develop open source / EU alternative.

once serious progress is made there, more resources can be redirected into AI after all it's already too late to join the race.

If these things replace search engines, you definitely don't want that technology to originate from China or other country where "truth" comes from Dear Leader

What if you use the model to write children's stories and it starts regurgitating Mein Kampf?

Having some knowledge about the training data is useful.

As a European: I do.

Except if it stops coming from anywhere.

you should care

not being technically independent means you'll end up being a serf when American or Chinese companies decide that you don't have access anymore for geopolitical reasons

That's a very limiting view of things. A model, even an open weight one, is never neutral, it is an encoding of a way of viewing the world.

What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.

Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.

I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default.

I'm ready to stand corrected, but I'm pretty positive that such a process would require 1) an insane amount of work and 2) wouldn't produce anything close to SOTA results because of the lack of training data.

It is my understanding that - sadly - the insane amount of copyrighted works and corporate crap is a prerequisite for having a corpus that is big enough

There are models that do that, for example the Olmo family of models, although they have Gemma 3 performance levels for that matter.

Individual Indians are very much present in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I have a theory that the top 5% talent of Indian nationals who are legitimately qualified and skilled, for very logical reasons would much rather take a six-figure USD equivalent salary in EUR or USD and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that come with it rather than bootstrap an Indian domestic AI lab.

India suffers from massive tech brain-drain to USA. Also the country is severely GPU compute-constained. It's really just the same story as EU.

What about producing hardware capable of producing hardware capable of SOA models?

Training data plays a huge role. As an example, Qwen 3 was generally considered a significant improvement over Qwen 2.5, but the architecture only had minor tweaks. The major change was the quantity and quality of training data they used for Qwen 3.

qwen is a magical model. it has the mandate of heaven. was so already at 3.6-27B