Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

As expected, Europe finally catches up to 2024 and launches an LLM that barely competes against the heavyweights.

The US and China are running rings around Europe.

Mistral is an exception as it was funded by US VCs and they are a great example showing that without VC funding, Mistral would have been begging to the EU for a microsopic grant to train a LLM worse than Llama.

View on HN

EuroLLM is not a business venture so you can only compare it to other publicly funded and developed models of the US and China.

Mistral is pretty much toast? Their models perform poorly and I'm not sure why anyone would use them. Maybe there is a catching up point somewhere in the future, hopefully.

less exposure to a technology that doesn't bring that much revenue and it's not projected to do so in the upcoming years.

yep, Europe is demonstrating the same sort of strategic thinking that economic behemoths like the Smithsonian use

Why wasting money on trying to compete at all then?

Every country needs a few plumbers and carpenters whether or not they are at the forefront of technology. Some money must be spent to give academics work to do so they can sharpen up their skills and perhaps teach the next set of students who might be more commercial

It would be a better use of the money to hire someone who has worked on actual frontier models to teach at European universities

If you could find one for the money, if they were happy to teach in the long term. If it wasn't better to have N for the price of 1. In other situations of import substitution I'm pretty sure people try to develop their local talent in addition to buying in experts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com