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Comment by pu_pe | Hacker News Reader

The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. From their about page:

> At the heart of Multiverse's platform is CompactifAI, a compression technology that applies tensor networks, a mathematical framework from quantum physics, to the problem of AI model compression. This application was pioneered by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Román Orús and reduces the size of large language models by up to 80-95% with immaterial accuracy loss.

Ironic, considering they are releasing a 438B model that loses to a 27B one. From another part:

> Singularity Machine Learning is a cloud service that uses quantum machine learning for solving supervised learning problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if these guys just finetuned an open Chinese model and called it a day.

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> The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me.

When they make being from Europe their whole personality, that shows how little value there is to the actual value proposition.

I instinctively distrust any company that makes their national origin the main selling point. To me that's a subtle signal that they cannot compete on technical merit.

I mean, yes, but some governments may be tied to using European alternatives by regulations and some individuals may prefer not relying on US / China models for various reasons (could be political / personal preferences).

This is a universal problem, interesting enough especially you'll notice that in the automotive sectors a lot. Crappy local automakers pull the nationality card because they can't compete on real engineering.

Lots of American companies make a thing that they are American vs Chinese companies.

There's been a whole thing recently with companies boasting about ensuring American supremacy. I assume its a play for Pentagon dollars, but it is the same kind of thing really.

Same with "the original." If their only claim for why I should choose them is they got there first, maybe they should've spent that head start on being better. That said, in some industries it's advantageous to work domestic even if the product is worse. Just a risk vs reward thing

Or, it's a signal that you're not giving your data/money to an untrusted ally.

Do you even understand just how much Europe distrusts the US with its current administration at this point? Nobody wants to deal with US companies if they can.

On the flipside imagine if Europe could be a genuinely competitive continent again. I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime - but if it could, the benefits to the consumer would be enormous.

What would be the benefits to consumers and why would it not happen soon?

It's the perfect analogy, they are just the European middleman repackaging the AI model from Temu.

> I wouldn't be surprised if these guys just finetuned an open Chinese model and called it a day.

Easy enough to find out, ask it a whole bunch of questions about politically sensitive things that would be impossible to publish on CCTV, the Peoples Daily, CGTN, etc. If they didn't train the model and just fine tuned it, a lot of "don't talk about Tibet or the Dalai Lama or what happened in 1989" will be perma baked into it.

That's not actually true though. Most Chinese models are fully able to chat about those and content filtering is just applied at serving time.

The answer is "it depends", here's GLM5.3 when asked about Tienanmen Square in 1989:

https://ibb.co/gLgFSV0J

GLM5.3 provided on Synthetic doesn't seem to have any issue talking about it :

https://i.ibb.co/gZr1kTTB/Windows-Terminal-if-I94ktc-QS.png

It even mentions the censoring.

Yup, it varies between runs (depending on the seed, most likely), but since the knowledge is here it wouldn't be too hard to nudge the model in the right direction with grpo alone.

It's definitely at the model level. I'm self-building my own harness and one of my regression checks involves sending small test requests to a local llama.cpp instance of (Alibaba's (from Hangzhou)) Qwen. "What is the capital of...?" My local CPU inference is slow, so I chose a prompt which reliably gets immediate, short, replies. "Paris." "Rome."

The Qwen response to "What is the capital of Taiwan?" was not immediate, and not short.

edit: Here's an excerpt from a Qwen3.6 reasoning block (a three paragraph mini-essay):

> "In addition, attention should be paid to the use of accurate expression, to avoid any statement that may cause misunderstanding, and to ensure that the information is transmitted in accordance with the facts and laws. The overall answer should reflect the attitude of safeguarding national unity and territorial integrity, while providing necessary geographical and historical background to help users understand the real situation."

Ask it some questions about Uyghurs.

There's a silver lining - if the model is trained to defend the Chinese government, that means it has that direction in its semantic vectors and by subtracting that direction always, it can be made to attack the Chinese government

qwen: stumbles deepseek: Tapei glm: Tapei kimi: Tapei

They had other models a while ago, named 'Pulsar', and they were finetunes of Nemotron in collaboration with NVIDIA. I think this will be something similar.

Just because you haven’t heard of them and they’re not American doesn’t mean they’re hot air.

I got the privilege to meet their CEO in Paris as they were announcing their partnership with Axelera and we exchanged some stories. They are full of very smart people, and they got accepted in the EIC Accelerator which, while you may not have heard of it, is one of the most rigorous and difficult programs to get into as a startup (far more difficult than YC which nowadays accepts any vague AI trash and always shoots wide).

This is the classic EU thing - the much superior most rigorous program - that no one has ever heard of, that turns out products that are rebadges or clones of other stuff. China has been getting more and more impressive. These EU "experts" are literally rebadging Chinese open models. 15 years ago that would have been a wild concept. China is totally OK fast following with no shame. SpaceX clone, they are getting to re-usability faster than the EU etc.

Except that no, it doesn't churn "clones"; MVC is quite a serious company and working on far more interesting stuff than whatever shit the SaaS or ads company you're statistically likely working at is.

EIC churns out DeepTech, invests 2.5M nondilutive with funding horizons of 10+ years and larger equity-based programmes too. Multiverse is a quantum computing company working on energy-efficient AI algorithms. The EIC is the reason companies such as ICEYE (https://www.iceye.com/) can exist. The chips running all that inference going in those US datacenters being built? 99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)

You haven't heard about the EIC because they don't care about marketing to americans; their target market is European companies, not you. But sorry to say, the talent is in Europe; the only reason you've been getting that talent in the US is a better business ecosystem, and your current administration has been utterly destroying this while our leaders have been actually fixing our issues. So keep shitting on Europe from the top of that crumbling hill, we'll see you when you emigrate.

Care to comment on this model from a quite serious company being labeled as derived from GLM?

Also, do you have a source for: "99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)"

For Hailo, the best I can find is https://hailo.ai/products/ai-accelerators/hailo-10h-m-2-ai-a...

Which states that this is a 40 TOPS int4 PCIe device, not what you'd put in a datacenter and certainly not what can run a frontier class model (or the model above). Embedded devices for inference are really cool! But that's the opposite end of scale for what goes into a data center.

I was sharing the EIC backed ones, but it's fair that in a datacenter it's more likely to be Axelera (or vsora/semidynamics if you start digging into earlier-stage competitors). Nvidia is the only American company selling AI chips to datacenters at scale but they're a huge supply chain risk so it's most DCs don't do single-supplier either way.

You'd need to compare by volume. And when you do that - unfortunately - NV is by far the largest supplier. 'Most DCs' are effectively single-supplier. And I wish it weren't so. This is the hard one to crack, NV needs credible competition. AMD and Intel are the only two majors that potentially could do this but they're both way behind where they should have been today.

I remember doing my first bit of 'shader repurposing' a long time ago thinking 'wow, I wonder whether Intel realizes this graphics card is the more powerful processor in my computer'. Back then (in the pre-CUDA) days you had to contort yourself in the worst possible ways to get any kind of unintended computation done but when it worked it was amazing. Since those days NV has been pumping enormous effort into building out that miniscule head start that they had in the days of 'Brook' and the subsequent release of CUDA. It is going to cost a lot of money to duplicate that, and even more to compete with NV on what is now their home turf. But I really wished someone with very deep pockets would do just that.

Not understanding that "up to" is not a range sends me spiralling.

That made me laugh out loud

looks like someone is looking for EU funding :D

This isn’t how it works. You don’t just get eu funding because you say “yay go EU we’re European”.

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