alt Hacker NewsNone 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.
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Apertus was built by universities in Switzerland. Although not frontier it is fully open.
I'm actually more curious about IBM. Their granite series appears to be nowhere close to competitive.
They had Watson, remember, it won on jeopardy like 15 years ago? They've been at this for a long time
Maybe it's good at something else?
Mistral have moved to actually trying to make money, and been relatively successful; at least if we lived in a normal world.
They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...