None of these models come from universities, European or otherwise.

Mistral is clearly currently not competing for Frontier Model. Whether this is due to a lack of VC Funds or a lack of technical ability or the former arising from the latter would be interesting to know.

The top models are from startups. Among the FAANG only Google managed to get a Frontier model, and they litterally invented the architecture and have more money than they can possibly spend to throw at the problem. Facebook shows that even ungodly amounts of money don't get you there though.

So why did no EU based Startups succeed while two US start ups succeeded? I agree that that's a very important question the EU should ask. The Internet revolution was driven by US companies, and now AI will be as well, with Chinese Open Weights mixed in. The EU consistently can not turn its considerable economic output into fast moving tech firms.

To be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo.

ETH Zurich and EPFL universities recently put out an open model called Apertus (was on the HN front page a few months back), it's not a frontier model, but they built it properly regarding copyright and data transparency.

It might look a bit slow or old-fashioned, but focusing on doing things ethically and legally feels like a much better path than just joining the race to scrape everything.

They did muse spark ... it's not garbage.

Also what are they building it for? I'd think it's to serve ads better or something like that. Maybe Muse Spark fits facebook's needs perfectly...

> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI

They will forever have superior weights?

I also get the downvotes for the GPT thing, and agree with you about 5.5's quality, but TBH I don't think it's Anthropic marketing as just two other things:

1. SamA and his company has a well-deserved bad reputation and Anthropic got some early good PR for basically not being SamA.

2. Claude Code got early head space, Boris and crew basically "invented" this kind of agent, and so has first mover advantage despite its known reliability and cost issues.

3. Most people I talk to haven't even tried Codex for some reason

Also it's uncool to complain about downvotes.

I downvoted you for your complaining about downvotes fwiw.

And Zuck hasn't spent that much on AI yet. Half of that is projected spending for 2026.

As to whether it's all for nothing, Q1 2026 revenue was up 33% over Q1 last year, driven largely by...better AI-driven ad targeting. So the spending doesn't seem that crazy to me.

Well Europe is famously a laggard when it comes to new tech - in parts of Switzerland, two horses were required be mounted in front to carry cars up until 1925. UK required a person to walk in front of a car and wave a red flag.

"…Anthropic Marketeer strike force…"

Might also just be the result of "good will" (that the company has deftly fostered). Other companies might learn from Anthropic in that regard.