Hacker News Reader

Besides Mistral there are a bunch of smaller "research" models like https://huggingface.co/Almawave/Velvet-14B (Italian) and https://huggingface.co/projecte-aina/aguila-7b (Spanish/Catalan), but as far I'm aware, nothing that really competes with OpenAI/DeepSeek so far (which tbh, I don't think Google does at this time either? None of their models I've tried even came close to GPT4)

No, I don't think so.

I think most of the work done in AI here is focused on current applications of AI not on the development of new AI.

Europe: Deepmind. But if you mean EU, practically nobody. A lot of talent would just move to US for a 3x salary and smaller income tax on it.

AlephAlpha pretends to