Live data from Hacker News

Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

apertvs.ai

41–50 of 198 posts

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China's distillation labs This notion that Chinese labs are merely distilling frontier models is quite an unwarranted slur. Those labs have published WAY more useful research than US labs on RL techniques, novel model architectures, training pipelines, etc. They have also hit intelligence-per-parameter densities that US labs have yet to attain. Apart from that, merely training a model on outputs from another model,…

But have they? I understand that the Chinese side is illuminated and the American side is dark. I disagree that the Chinese labs have created anything that isn't in an American research lab or production dc. Sure the Chinese have published their findings and not for nothing. But are they novel? Unlikely imo

They are doing ta tremendous amount of novel research where American AI companies have "war rooms" to study their papers and models and American labs publish next to nothing. They have to often do more with less. As an AI researcher, Chinese labs are doing tremendous benefit to science whereas some American companies (and I'm American) seem to think only they are able to do AI research responsibility (I've been working on neural networks for 25+ years). I'm pretty sure Fable sabotaged my research codebase (see the news stories about this).

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I think you’re requirement that something only be “the art” if any arbitrary person can critique it is off. The frontier labs are working on the state of the art but it’s just art that you aren’t allowed to see. Unfortunately.

It is work using the principles of the art, obviously. But "state of the art" implies the highest state of general availability, not just in terms of access to some product, but of use of the ideas, concepts, methodologies etc. Anthropic and OpenAI have "cutting edge" models; the state of the art is behind the cutting edge. The state of the art is the best open source, open weights model available. More or less by de…

I appreciate this distinction. The are multiple senses of SOTA and one that has been taking on greater mindshare is as a synonym of “the best available”. By rebasing on SOTA as generally available and understood versus cutting edge, which has limited distribution and leads the way, we expand the vocabulary we have available to describe what’s going on. Thanks.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#43
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data" I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".

The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.

Can you give examples?

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#44
I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#45
post #29
post #20

It's good that there is a movement for open LLMs, but it's not where the battleground is right now . The battleground is local vs service LLMs, and we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks. How many normal people do you know who use "ChatGPT"? A lot, probably. How many even know what "Gemma" is, let alone have downloaded llama.cpp, a GGUF file from…

normal people dont really have the hardware to run local models

They have it, we just haven’t enabled them. The smart model with a chat box is the wrong abstraction for local. Ideally we would have it built into applications as a clear and easy to use opt-in feature. Like allowing a user to index a folder on their hard drive and then search it semantically via embeddings. You could do that on fairly low end hardware these days. Like 2GB of RAM with any processor made within the last 10 years.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#46
I'm mildly surprised that more people aren't using Nemo models for this reason. We've moved most of our processing to a combination of Nemo Ultra and Super, with some support for multi-model-specific tasks on Omni. The setup is working REALLY well for us, and I'm comfortable with the more measured pace of improvements. We work with many long-context problems, and the ecosystem is great.

There were a number of use cases where we needed to use Gemini (audio modality), and Ultra has been a VERY cost-effective alternative once we got through the nuances.

Re: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

#49
post #29
post #20

It's good that there is a movement for open LLMs, but it's not where the battleground is right now . The battleground is local vs service LLMs, and we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks. How many normal people do you know who use "ChatGPT"? A lot, probably. How many even know what "Gemma" is, let alone have downloaded llama.cpp, a GGUF file from…

normal people dont really have the hardware to run local models

They may not right now, but the whole point of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC standard (even though it's somewhat anemic) is to run models locally. Apple Silicon with enough unified memory is capable. Not to mention modern iPhones and Pixels have fairly capable NPUs and routinely run local models. So, we may not be to the point where most normal people have the hardware to run local models, but it is rapidly approaching.
Post reply on HN