Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

Even if the US does ban it, Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives. Even if there is regulatory capture in the US, the rest of the world isn't going to follow suit until the current market leaders outright are replaced with other competitors that Europe would want to favor. The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.

View on HN

> lack of European competitors

There's Mistral. Although they've been surprisingly quiet for the last 6 months.

They are profitable and active on the enterprise local model territory. You can RL a model with them for your own purposes and I heard good things about it.

Mistral's business model works even if they start using Chinese models instead of training their own.

If China keeps releasing LLMs with such permissive licenses it probably works better since the pretraining rnd is subsidized and de-risked - but that’s a big if.

France might do something mad and take that route, but EU wide ain't happening for Mistrals sake.

Would be hard for them to act alone due to free movement in EU. Would be hard for them to outlaw a German business from offering the models from a German datacenter to French customers.

> There's Mistral

https://trackingai.org

Mistral: eq.IQ ~70

Kimi, Claude, Grok, Gpt, Gemini: eq.IQ ~130+

Yeeeah, if the test on this site can’t say anything better than “it was created by a member of Mensa”, I’m gonna have to assume it’s a generally useless test.

The tests are detailed on the site. And your logic is faulty.

Theres a pretty big chance imho that europe will follow suit , or at least the segmenets that are fully aligned with the US on all things china even to their own detriment. Remeber rip and replace Huawei 5G because of national security , leading to some parts of europe having worse coverage than some tiny african markets. Best bet would be for europe to look at it like what it is an open source commodity that is useful to build on rather than a moat to extract rents with.

If it was 2021, probably. But Trump has soured relations in the last 18 months enough that the soft power about technology isn't there like it once was assumed to be. What's he going to do if Europe doesn't step in? Jack up tariffs? Is it that day of the week already?

Open weights is more beneficial to Europe spring-boarding a catch up than defending Claude/Anthropic.

If CADA passes in its current state I doubt we'll be banning Chinese models any time soon. I think most people misunderstand the extent of the permanent damage caused by Trump

He threatened to go to war with Denmark over Greenland. In the US, that might just be a side story, a little joke from insane grandpa president. But it's not in Europe. And it's only one of the crazy adversarial things he did.

Doubt it now when US declared that Europe is an enemy, Europe is banned from the best models and that US is considering an invasion of Europe (Greenland). The days of US influence in Europe is limited.

Yeah… but last 5 years happened and UE is now in the overdrive to decouple from Usania :D

well, the EU just brought down the regulatory hammer which complicates things a bit. we will have to see if it operates as a proxy ban on open models depending on how they go about enforcing all the safety, bias, transparency and data provenance requirements.

I mean there is Mistral?

I mean it’s not competitive at all?

It has been more competitive than any other LLMs by non-US/CN companies. Including Korean and Japanese models in case you want to bring those up.

A distant third is not saying much.

It’s more that they have a different business case than competing for the top spots on public benchmarks.

They seem to be oriented more toward customizing models for the concrete needs of a company, on-prem deployment, proprietary knowledge-bases, etc.

It has produced some locally useful models.

>Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives [...] The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.

I agree, but you are underestimating EU regulatory incompetence

Reply on news.ycombinator.com