What’s the point of having “sovereign” weights that are worse than publicly available ones? Wouldn’t Europe be better off just keeping up-to-date on the Chinese releases? In the event of some schism requiring sovereign capability, or even if the Chinese pulled ahead and stopped releasing the weights, why would Europe be better off because of Mistral? (Or any country’s inferior sovereign effort make them better off?)
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened.
Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable if they hadn’t had a whole continent of wealthy customers, and no competition.
I don’t think Americans are realizing yet how much has changed for us the past two years.
Can I still get Google Adsense payments when Google has my European bank account and address if there are sanctions or something like that? Can I still login to my Cloudflare account and manage a domain registered with them? Will I lose access to Outlook or Gmail? Should I rely on Claude at all?
But the problem isn't if I can bypass sanctions, use VPNs, etc, or even if a company wants or can legally do that... it's the fact I'm asking these questions at all. It's not something I'd ask 15 years ago about US companies.
It doesn't happen overnight, but the adversarial behaviour of the current administration and the tariffs really changed the perspective about America on many Europeans.
The discussion about building European alternatives had never been so mainstream. If and once they emerge, I think the shift will happen. But let's see
The reality seems to be that for decades Europe gave only lip service to decoupling from American tech infrastructure, but in the last couple of years America has gone from being seen as a strong ally to being a major risk.
It will take time to move. Frankly as an American I hope it takes a long time and we get our shit together and rebuild our alliance with Europe. But it’s possible that the damage is not reversible in the next couple of decades and Europe will accelerate their decoupling. It’s also possible we continue to slide into imperialist authoritarianism (and Europe definitely accelerates their decoupling).
It's a slow shift, but it's coming. For instance, Airbus already picked a French AWS replacement (Scaleway). It won't be all, it won't be tomorrow, but "what happens if we get tariffed / they invade Greenland" is already part of everyone's disaster planning.
I'm not sure if it's really a "trump agenda". The ideas didn't start with him, the people who voted for said ideas aren't going to suddenly disappear, and this is his second term.
It looks more like part of the new normal from the outside, and that's why things are changing. A country can't go from reliable to unreliable partner every 4 years without any consequences.
Even the people that voted for Trump didn't sign up for this, which is why his approval ratings are terrible even by historic standards. He didn't run on a platform of "attack Canada and suck up to Putin". Most Americans are very pro-European. Most of the voting population has living memory of the cold war.
As to what happens post-Trump, it's anyone's guess. I expect a hard reset. Markets have short memories, as they say.
Not to the same extent, but during his first term, his administration had issues with Canada, Mexico, Europe/UK, NATO, China, etc. And he was elected again. Clearly it wasn't a huge issue for those who are bothered to go out and vote.
In any case, for everyone else, it's the second time in 10 years that they have to play the waiting game until it's over. It's good to be optimistic, but when you're in charge of a country, you can't just plan for the best and rely on hope alone. Same if you run a company or even for services you use yourself.
Regarding memories, I don't know about the markets, but in Europe I think it will take a few years for everyone to forget that in 2026 Denmark had to transfer blood reserves to Greenland and that different European countries deployed tripwire forces because of... the US of A. Do you know who triggers similar responses? Russia, when they start saying that their borders are fluid.
2 things here, one is related to benchmaxxing, another to being good enough
1. Mistral isn't benchmaxxing. That doesn't mean they're better, but it does mean the benchmark gap not a good reflection of the actual gap
2. I think the "world class or nothing" framing mixes general capability with system capability.
Most deployments don't need AGI
In RL you need a model that's reliably good at one or two things, thats it.
Example:
Case of a hospital flooded in emails.
You make a system that decides which patient emails needs a human and drafts replies for the rest.
If a sovereign model is good enough at that, and you can run it on a hospital's own servers under EU jurisdiction, the frontier gap part has zero importance
Who cares about "beats DeepSeek / GPT11 / Claude Fairytale 8.9"
Not sure if you are European, but in EU it's a bit taboo to even talk about this in this manner. We like to spend a lot of money to make sure we finish last.
China's model for decades has been to do it cheaper and then do it better for cheaper. Just accepting this makes you an economic vassal state. We've seen this play out over decades now with other industries. I'm not blaming China for this approach, but if you want to stay relevant, then you need to compete.
You don't need to view China as some scary boogeyman who's going to use AI to attack you or w/e the current conspiracy is. They just need to continue peacefully outperforming while everyone else gets fat and lazy.
The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.
We know it's possible to put backdoors into LLMs, we don't have reliable ways to detect them without direct support from whoever inserted it.
Europe is less-worse-off with open weights than with… I guess it's weights-as-a-service? WaaS? The thing Anthropic and OpenAI do.
But that's not enough. As recently demonstrated, being just a few months behind with the power differential between defending with an open weight model while being attacked by a leading model, means losing absolutely.
I do not know if this holds going forward or not. It's not inconceivable that we're just about to get models that make unhackable code, using all the things software developers keep saying you need to do if you really care about security.
But anyone concerned about sovereignty can't bet the farm on this possibility. For the moment, it looks like it's a national security matter to ensure at least core state functionality (including core private sector logistics) gets the absolute best attention money can buy, and that the absolute best money can buy ("can buy" does a lot of heavy lifting here) is currently LLMs, and it's important those LLMs aren't going to get cut off by arbitrary whim like Mythos was, and it's important that those LLMs don't have backdoors like we can't rule out anyone else's from having.
This is true even if Europe was only defending from Russian cyberwarfare and didn't need to plan for the president of the country in which Mythos was developed, attempting to annex two NATO states.
Any model, even an open weight one, is fundamentally 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 and that's why the sovereign part is important.
Is there a specific concern you have, and what kind of performance penalty is it worth to you on say coding tasks?
Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competitive but has this alignment is the solution, rather than accepting an inferior one.
I think for coding tasks, it probably doesn't matter as much. I'm more worried about stuff like chatbots subtly pushing or normalizing a certain world view.
I think I'm not the only one that's had this revelation, recall the Llama4 announcement. [0]
> It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.
> Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models
This goal of course is self-defeatingly impossible to achieve. There is no unbiased, there's always only an unbiased relative to the bias of the observer.
Phrased differently, models weren't right leaning enough for the American oligarchy class and they publicly shared their desire to change the ideology they perpetuate.
I think an important perspective to keep in mind here is Zizek, the philosopher who's dedicated his life's work to the functioning of ideology.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
-- Slavoj Zizek
My concern is that both the Americans and the Chinese will be aligning their models more and more ideologically and that they will function as the perfect propaganda machine - surface-level objective and unthreatening, but answering every question asked from a world view decided elsewhere.
For some tasks (like aforementioned coding), that won't matter and there we can use whatever model is most capable. But as we outsource more and more of our thinking to AI and use it more and more to educate impressionable young people, not having our own models will mean not getting a say in how societies views are shaped and perpetuated.
Imagine for example, the question: "What caused the French revolution?" There's many answers that might be technically correct. Which ones get emphasized is where ideology lives and gets perpetuated.
Since there is no unideological, the best we can do is a pluralism of ideologies building LLMs. To not build one representing your views is for your views to not be represented.
This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified.
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas.
Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.
All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.
I think you're missing the context, which isn't musing on what it is to be human and can machines think, but the purpose of Joe Smith's LinkedIn account expressing that he has ideas about X is to convey the message that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to venture an opinion on it, and Joe Smith has actually just set up an automated process to generate content without thinking about X, that perverts the purpose of communicating that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to propose the following ideas he been thinking about...
Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a program trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.
The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks
I get the context, but then the comment I'd replied to would have said that humans get better at communicating their ideas by writing their ideas on their own, rather than that writing is some kind of human-only mode of exposition. It's not.
And nor is an LLM generating text just "copy/pasting a Wikipedia article", you'd think people on HN would be smarter than that at least.
If all Joe Smith is going to do is cat $(which claude) to his LinkedIn, then he'll deserve the poor results he gets from it, but we shouldn't mistakenly say that this will be because LLMs simply cannot write. It would be just as dumb for Joe Smith to do with with a professional human ghostwriter.
> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
Absolutely agree. A modern agent is a sophisticated tool that can link multiple sources together to create a coherent piece of information hyper-specified for an audience. However, if humans have outlines that are expandable by LLMs it makes the most sense to do that as late as possible.
I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better.
But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem.
Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will
So many people seem completely blind to LLM writing, they are fine sharing it on social media or at work. I think it’s people who are “not details people” and are used to judging something without reading it based on superficial cues which is what LLMs are optimized for.
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
It’s funny, it’s obviously understandable why someone would vibe code a placeholder website, we’ve all probably done it. But I’m realizing a basic unstyled html thing with minimal copy is probably a better signal at this point for startups, it makes it clear you are still working on it rather than giving up the impression you might think your vibeslop is the finished product.
I’ve been a cleaner, and watched other people clean. I had a theory that if you paid $100k (or whatever good salary) you would probably get more value than paying 5 people 20k. I think there’s lots of value in paying people well at “low skill” jobs when you actually want them to be good, but also probably lots of reasons it never gets tried. Most of the time it would be the owner of a small business doing the high value version of the low skill job I suspect.
Very cool, after watching a minute it grew on me and I can see why the perspective is useful.
My immediate thought is that this is what is would be like to drive in The Spindle in Neuromancer or any similar space environment that’s spinning for artificial gravity.
It was funny to watch this discussion turn from skepticism at the top to then a bunch of proponents moving in and crowding out the rational voices. It feels a bit religious to me, at least unscientific, there are obviously no testable hypotheses about subjective descriptions, and so people seem to dig in on their sides more than if there was a real basis for comparison. I default to not believing in it until there is actual strong evidence, same as ghosts and the Loch Ness monster and whatnot.
I'm not sure how the examples given in this thread, such as brain scans, are "unscientific" while simply saying "nah, I believe everybody else is exactly like me" is "rational voice"?
I feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.
They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.
I’ve see no evidence it’s anything but this. I have no idea if I have it or not or just describe stuff differently. I think this is logically much more likely. It’s a “what does it feel like to be conscious?” or “is my red your red” kind of question. There’s no external benchmark, no way to objectively compare, so you just get a spectrum of reports about the same thing.
I think I understand the incentives that cause this to exist (it would be politically worse to say we’re just going to use Chinese models) but they are misguided. If sovereigns want to have valuable models, they should insist on world class, relevant ones like the Chinese have. Instead they embrace mediocrity in the name of sovereignty.
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