Grok's latest model is objectively superior to any of the current Google models in the most relevant use cases. I don't like Elon musk but that does not change reality.
And Google came up with the Transformer architecture (2017 "Attention is all you need"). The Attention mechanism they based it on is from Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio (2014, ICLR 2015). And there were many other self-attention variants by 2017. It was an amazing paper but let's not twist the story and give proper credit.
And not one of the people in that paper are still at Google, AFAIK.
Google has more compute, more data, and had the best 2 labs. And it seems they squandered it all. I'd blame their McKinsey CEO, the board, and management in general. It's a shadow of what it used to be. And it's a shame.
Still way ahead of xAI in anything meaningful, including market share, enterprise customer buy-in, existing office software moat, etc… Not saying consultant/business-idiot CEOs aren’t a problem, but have you seen Edolf Musk? Again, kind of a silly take…
AGPL only closes the SaaS loophole and forces them to publish their changes to the code. It's not anti-business at all.
You could argue the BSL is anti-business. But IMHO even that one is only a reaction to abuse. Database companies investing millions in research, development, and maintenance for some trillion dollar corporation to take it and make billions off it without giving back a single penny.
IMHE the models work much better if you go directly to the creator's API. DeepSeek V4 official API gives me 8x better caching so it was 40% cheaper in my case. Unless it bothers you China gets your data instead of giving it to the American VC-backed companies.
It also prefer to give my money to the pro-social companies giving away their open models (they cost many millions) instead of opportunists who don't give much back.
You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition (and thus not worth throwing subsidies at, because any economic advantage is fleeting at best).
Looking at the data and related past experience, this looks like a pretty solid bet (despite the "risk" being hard to quantify).
> You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition
And that's a bet they will lose 100%. Once the Chinese starts imposing export bans/controlling the access to their models, Europe would be at the mercy of US/China to allow them access or just rely on miserable mistral
Again, you are assuming that frontier models will stay meaningfully ahead long-term. Export controls/bans are pointless if this is not the case.
There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven assumption, and "automatically" negates your lead over time.
Similarly, purely "intellectual" advantage in disciplines like cryptography/computer chess/algorithm design never really stayed concentrated, either.
I would take the other side of this bet. While I agree that the impact of any given advance is likely to resemble a sigmoid curve, I think there is a material chance of "stacking sigmoids" creating something that looks exponential.
To take a simple example, look at the progress of technology over the last ~500 years - it seems to me that the rate of change continues to accelerate despite many of the logistic curves flattening along the way.
There are still huge unanswered questions about whether or not the stacking sigmoids will favor the incumbents. But I would not definitively bet against the people with the most compute data, talent and money.
I'm unsure what exactly you mean by sigmoid stacking.
I'd argue that a lot of important technologies (like circuit design!) started at basically zero in the last century, and the progress was actually exponential for a significant time (=> because we started so low on the curve).
But if you reduce things to a single metric (wealth per person? total energy available to humanity? global industrial/construction output in tons?) I can't think of anything where such "stacking" successful subverted the sigmoid trend (or looks like it will, long-term).
It is not about intellectual advantage, but about capabilities as well. Assuming that Europe would get all the knowledge they need on the cutting edge technology on how to train a frontier model (which they won't because US and China would guard this as national secrets), who is going to setup infrastructure to train the model? Who is building the data centers (multi-year project) and who is going to build the energy infrastructure? Just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you have the capability to do that as well.
One of the best example is nuclear reactors. By now the know how and technology is fairly mature and open, but not every country gets to build nuclear reactors. Same would be with the frontier models as well.
EU should have already started investing in the infrastructure side in-case they obtain the know how, but your politicians are still bickering on pension reforms and Ukrainian war, etc.
They can just operate and provide normal access to their services, just block AI access. This is already happening, apple would not release new Siri in EU (granted it's due to a regulation clash) but this would be a testing point.
If Europeans are still paying the same prices for sub par services/products to their American counter parts, it's win-win situation for those companies. Just sell a dumbed down non-AI version of service/product in EU for an inflated price.
Meta's FAIR has several R&D offices in the EU, yes. So you are saying their labs can conduct R&D on models in the EU, potentially even train them there, they just can't have production LLM inference serving or release the model weights? I'm just not seeing it.
A not-insignificant portion of the AI/ML research community is in the EU.
What you’re failing to understand is that meta is ultimately a US company. If meta unveils a powerful frontier model tomorrow and US impose a ban of its exports, regardless of how many research, data centres, meta has in EU, they will restrict access to the model for EU citizens, same way Anthropic did.
Regarding the open weights, I don’t see meta doing that for their future models, especially once they have their own frontier models. Open weight models are kinda marketing strategy where they use it as a bait and switch. A lot of Chinese companies became popular with their open wight models and once they build that reputation they have no incentive to keep on releasing new open weighted models
In an imaginary world yes. Just because they know how, doesn’t mean that they can. It’s not like you can code a new model, you need compute power to train it, which they don’t have in EU.
Also meta could just take the best mind in EU research centres to US with millions of dollars as yearly payments
Again, super computers are not used to train frontier models. Please do your own research before blobbing just random links. By the time they triple those data centres the AI race is already lost
GB200 and GB300 are decent for training LLMs? H100 can be used also? Though the current European deployments are rather small, even the biggest are just some thousand GPUs.
Pretty sure there would be a number of EU states who'd happily pump some money in if the EU were to mandate the ECB to (incentivise intermediary banks to) buy their corresponding long dated sovereign debt cheaply to fund it.
Perhaps, but in the same breath, from the limited things I've seen and heard, they're extremely reluctant to take any risk with these types of funding schemes when disbursing, so unless it's tried and tested it's not getting off the ground i.e. it's unlikely to lead anywhere considering current state of market.
I mean we can barely get EU to host with EU providers. Nevermind something so speculative.
There's potentially a virtuous circle of increased EU tech investment and increased EU tech provider adoption but given the risk aversion sclerosis that affects the european private investment community this does need to be government led. I'd agree the US private debt fuelled $1Tn build out is mostly unsustainable but when you look at what China was able to achieve with govt support on a ˜120bn AI sector investment it behoves the EU to take a stand, the first 100bn is probably the least risky.
Why? Worst se we are 10 years behind them. Second mover advantage will also be there, it this is so critical indeed.
What happened to China because they were third movers in the race to the nuclear weapons? Nothing. They were pretty behind for a while technologically. The wheels have turned. Stop looking at the world as a short strategy game match, or like a Hollywood movie where everything is all-or-nothing. Many parts of south America are way behind in IT, automotive, space, yet many people have meaningful and happy lives there.
I'm yet to accept that the power-block I'm living within being first in the AI race provides a meaningful life to me.
EU's leadership doesn't have much power that way, the EU is a thin layer on the countries.
In the US the federal government has much more power but nobody is attributing the term good fortunes of the AI industry to the recent federal policy there. (There's long term stuff that does make a difference in hoovering up the global R&D talent and concentrating capital, but that's a different kettle)
There's very little betting on any particular AI models going on by the commission/EP. The Pleias article claims a 2020 eurocrat whitepaper determined how things go, but that's fantastical.
Science
The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China’s Academic Stars
Shamed by a blogger, Chinese universities wage blitzkrieg against academic fraud
SINGAPORE—Compared with the glacial pace of American universities, the Chinese decision was practically a summary execution.
On May 12, video blogger Geng Hongwei alleged that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The university announced a probe the same day. A month later, it said it confirmed misconduct, fired a postdoctoral researcher and ousted the dean of the university’s Institute of Translational Medicine.
A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China and perhaps the nation’s most powerful person in medical science. With a single five-minute video, the 33-year-old graduate-school dropout can stop an academic star’s career in its tracks.
There was a submission earlier but it didn't get any upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755074. I wouldn't mind if this thread is merged into that one... as long as the discussion stays in the front page. Many times conversations got suppressed due to "dupe" merged into older submissions!
