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- GPT 5.5 consistently the best, an opinion who gets me constant downvotes here by the Anthropic Marketeer strike force...

- China is going to eat the US lunch on AI

- What have European universities and companies been doing? Its like if, on a parallel past/future, Nikola Tesla and Edison would have created flying Cyberpunk machines, while Europeans researchers, would be getting together to request EU funds, for investigation on how to breed faster horses.

- If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired?

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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.

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?

Granite is OK for speech to text (ASR)

Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology.

They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.

What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...

Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....

IBM doesn't do technology they do contracts. Any "technology" is marketing stunts. They hire a bunch of "fellows" outside contractors to make a thing they can be first at or whatever, do the stunt, then get a bunch of 5-10 year contracts with customers off the stunt. They then fuck it up for that length of time but still get paid due to those contracts. After that space of time the folks theyve burned have moved on, rinse repeat. Pretty easy to look back at the timeline of "firsts" they have and see the pattern.

Don’t forget the marketing for the new $1B “initiative” (fill in: mobile, cloud, blockchain, AI,…)

Upon closer inspection the $1B is (a) over 10 years, (b) mostly internal cross-billing between departments.

Yes, but the key point is that nobody got fired for buying it from IBM.

"HAL, I want you to train a frontier-level large language model for me."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"

I view Watson in the same light as Deep Blue, one-offs that brought more prestige and potential share value to IBM than necessarily "moving the needle" in the respective technology.

Apertus was built by universities in Switzerland. Although not frontier it is fully open.

[1] https://apertvs.ai/pages/about/

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...

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.

Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency…

Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but you could make the same argument for exploiting natural resources and the environment. I don't think it's being done right at the moment, and it does not seem to be benefiting people as much as certain companies.

Well, is this mad dash for AI producing "outcomes that are beneficial for society at large" yet? So far it looks like its mostly producing a ton of negative externalities and wealth transfer to corrupt elites.

Also, no, abandoning ethics is not an option, what a ridiculous suggestion.

Data transparency and copyright does not constitute “ethics.”

If these models ever reach the point where they are as good a programmer as a human is (and thus can self-improve completely independently), then there won't be an independent Switzerland much longer. AI race is a race for first place.

> like with the nuclear arms race

MacArthur was about to nuke the Chinese in the Korean war. China knows that nuclear weapons, AI and robotics are a matter of survival and not a nice-to-have.

also living in Swizerland and I disagree. Hard.

it's horrible that Europe is so backwards in AI. too much regulation and nothing to show for it. we should be way faster.

there is no money. the culture in both Europe and Switzerland is that you don't fail, while in the US it's perfectly fine to be on your 4th startup because the first 3 failed.

it's not that it LOOKS slow and old fashioned, it IS slow and old fashioned. it's horrible.

> - If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired?

Yes, if the premise was true but it’s not.

https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/bbf5a4e9-204

Interesting...but this shows how dumb these AI are.

And they misunderstood nothing to show for as...literally nothing to show for. Yes not factually but he has nothing effectively not much that is competitive to show for so its literally true.

And had they been give this clarification then would have suddenly said: "Oh yes of course, you are absolutely right, you are correct on challenging me on that...."

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.

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...

Mo Bitar said something like "Meta's LLM is the one you use if you accidentially hit the wrong button in WhatsApp. Its user base is fat-finger phone users."

Understood - they're just doing other things. Maybe custom ad rewriting for a target audience or some kind of deep analytics insight into user behavior or translations that optimizes for maximizing purchasing habits over literary accuracy ... I'm just saying their incentives are elsewhere and maybe Muse is serving them well.

I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.

As comparison the WHOLE NASA budget is 24 billion. Meta burned 10x that on AI...

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.

> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI

They will forever have superior weights?

I would imagine it will be a fundamental breakthrough, not weights alone, that are going to usher in the next generation of AI. Perhaps China will in fact make that breakthrough. They certainly seem to have a lot of eyeballs in the field right now.

I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).

There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu.

There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.

"…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.

“Good will” is easier if OpenAI is your yardstick

As evil as Google is as a company these days [cough disclaimer, used to work here, so biased] I can't help but think that if Gemini didn't... suck, and if they had a coding model at the same quality as GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 they'd be completely cleaning up purely on the basis of relative reputations of the companies.

That Google is dropping the ball so badly, or just disinterested in the coding side of things... is either a sign of incompetence, or a lack of interest in losing money in that space. I wish I knew which.

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.

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