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Comment by amoshebb | Hacker News Reader

Qwen3.8 27B beats Kolibri 79.9 vs 70.8 in German in Kolibri's harness on Kolibri's benchmark.

Also, once the Cohere takeover is complete will they still be able to use this "sovereign" claim despite being 90% owned and 100% operated out of Toronto?

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This is visible in Figure 1, but the point they're making there seems to be all about the Pareto frontier: they say Kolibri is something like 3x faster at token generation. That can be a perfectly fine trade-off.

(It's MoE vs dense, I'm sure. But Qwen's own MoE models don't score as well as their dense models.)

Disclaimer: I am part of the team that trained Kolibri, opinions are mine.

Qwen models have solid performance on benchmarks and we're transparent about this in the report. We're just happy to share a European alternative in the small model space, where I don't think we can afford to be fully dependent on China. We also put a lot of effort into German language quality things that don't show up in evals at all (style, Grammar, German reasoning, etc).

Sovereignty is imho mostly about choice and control over your data. Cohere is no different on that front and personally I'm quite excited about what we will build together post-merger.

Souvereignty is about ownership and about knowing the training data. That is especially important given a business model aiming at the government as a key customer. With Schwarz, Cohere, SAP, NVIDIA and the like as backers society can’t have souvereignty in any meaningful way. Of course it would be a plus to keep US agencies out of the data streams. But this technology will be used to support and make decisions that impact citizens. That being said, incredible achievement.

Well, it's still independent from the USA and China.

The main problems with big corp AI are due to control of access in the first place and control of what they output.

When you make your industry reliant on such choke points, you render yourself the opposite of "sovereign" for sure. Having multiple independent suppliers at least mediates that.

My account is banned, so for whomever with [showdead] on:

What's so "not-sovereign" for an open-weights American or an open-weight-open-training-process Chinese LLM?

Do we also need sovereign Linux (maybe), sovereign Postgres (most likely not), sovereign Python (def not)?

You are not banned FYI

It's more that all their comments are dead, some for good reason.

If it's banned then maybe you shouldn't be posting...

Given your other comments I can see why it was banned.

Yeah I think a model has to be actually good to claim sovereignty, as in competitive enough that people want to use it. Chinese and US LLMs are the only ones in these categories right now. Mistral and Cohere have the same problem, yes they are made in different countries but they are not competitive. They (France and Canada in this case) would be better off just downloading Chinese LLMs, even if they get cut off they still have the weights.

I’m most familiar with Canada, where sovereign is usually just an excuse to overpay someone connected for an inferior product with no strategic value.

We have to start somewhere. And I am not sure that you understand what the word sovereign means since it’s entirely disconnected from how “good” something is.

Mistral's medium is absolutely good enough to help with a ton of coding tasks. I've personally used it and found it very helpful. If hypothetically the US cut off the rest of the world from their models Mistral would be a very useful model to continue to use.

Also, it's not like it's fixed in time, they are continually building more powerful models as well. Simply because you're in second place doesn't mean you quit the journey. Though, I'm sure the US has a huge vested interest of convincing people to "just quit and submit."

No. Thanks.

I was also quite surprised to see that. Considering the effort Aleph Alpha put into to their new model, it seems like the Qwen team needs access to vast amounts of german data o.0 I'm really glad for these efforts for open models from within Europe.

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