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Comment by deaux | Hacker News Reader

Where are the competitive models from Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, Canada, India, the UK? From anywhere that isn't China or the US?

There are none. Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60, at worst it's second to Gemma 4 26B A4B. The above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so.

This particular Mistral Medium looks to be uncompetitive at that pricing. I'm surprised it's so expensive given its size. Wonder if we'll see other providers offer it for cheaper.

but that doesn't mean Mistral has never produced anything useful.

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> Korea

EXAONE from LG AI Research https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE

They had one of the best small models a few months ago and they released a new model just last week.

There's also HyperCLOVA X (haven't tested it, but maybe it is also good) https://huggingface.co/naver-hyperclovax

> India

India has the Sarvam model series, which admittedly are not SotA, but they have pretty good voice capabilities https://huggingface.co/sarvamai

The UAE (not part of the list above) also has a few noteworthy models: https://huggingface.co/tiiuae

I'm familiar with those models. They're nowhere near competitive. Miles away from Mistral or (obviously) Chinese models.

> (haven't tested it, but maybe it is also good)

I have. It is not.

You mentioned "pareto-competitive", and EXAONE certainly was that. The statement that the "above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so" is simply too broad.

You're talking about EXAONE 4.5 33B? Gemma 4 31B was released 1 week earlier and blows it out of the water. Which point in time/model size are you possibly talking about? The original K-EXAONE in January?

More than anything the availability speaks for itself. If it was indeed pareto competitive, all dozens of model providers would be doing their best to offer it for serverless inference. They don't. There's maybe one that does. Do you think a lot of companies wouldn't prefer a Korean model over a Chinese one? In this case, the market speaks. Go talk to people who run business based on putting billions or trillions of tokens through open weights models. And how much time they put into optimization of model selection to save money and latency. And ask why none of them are using EXAONE models. It's not because we're not aware of their existence. There's also reason to believe they've been benchmaxxing more than Chinese models, btw. Have you done the vibecheck?

I wish they were strong, I hope that in the future, they are. More diversity is better. So far they have not yet been a serious option at any point.

they should ask unsloth to follow them. For my usecases locally w/128GB, Qwen3.5-Coder-Next is SOTA.

DeepMind, which is headquartered in London, probably had a significant role in the development of the Gemini and Gemma models.

Yes, it might be a problem that the UK allows companies like this to be bought up by foreign countries.

Without Google’s funding its not obvious i DeepMind would have went anywhere.

Unless the moved to US for funding while keeping a back office in the UK.

It’s strange to expect anything significant to come out from Europe when VCs there are either very risk averse and/or don’t have enough cash to begin with. It’s not like government or EU funding can replace that since its almost always wasted or missdirected

It’s a company containing such remarkable talent that I’m sure they would not have run into significant issues raising capital on international markets.

It’s not like VCs are only allowed to invest in companies in their own country.

Usually to maximize its funding the company would move its HQ to the US and if they are lucky have an IPO there and eventually become effectively American after a few years (e.g. Unity)

I have no idea why @wasfgwp is downvoted - it's very true. +1 on that.

Yet ASML is always cited as a great Europe great achievement, but it's hardly ever mentioned that without American's EUV research and patents, and without Cymer there would be no AMSL as we known of.

In all honesty I believe ASML's success is mostly their own. Still, lamenting "being bought up by foreign countries" is a lame excuse.

What does Pareto competitive mean here? Look at the pricing of the V4-flash model: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing

80 percent as good for 20 percent the cost.

But it is worse and more expensive…

> What does Pareto competitive mean here?

Being near the Pareto frontier of inference cost vs. output quality.

This was released 6 days ago. The dust hasn't settled yet, and Mistral Small 4 was released earlier. Even if Deepseek V4-flash turns out to crush it, there was a period where it was Pareto competitive. None of the countries I named (i.e. no country that isn't China/US/Mistral) have had a Pareto competitive model at any point in time.

Although the Manus decision might change things for AI, Singapore-washing is quite rampant among Chinese companies, so I wouldn't call this place of origin an alternative market.

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