Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

multiversecomputing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 134 posts

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#11

Post by walrus01 »

I do not want open weight models from China to be the only viable locally hosted things (deepseek v4 flash 0731 Q8, qwen 3.8-flash-next Q8, GLM-5.3-Flash) in the under 200GB RAM class.

I want to see things like Mistral and Laguna (non-CN) succeed. I have spent about a week using Laguna S 2.1 as a test and while I wasn't blown away by its capabilities, it's also totally acceptable for many purposes.

I do hope these Quasar people learn that if you announce a new model and it already performs worse than things people can go download from huggingface, and/or buy access to with very cheap token plans via openrouter or opencode.. If your new model is API only and people can't download/examine it, it will get very little uptake and real world use.

I can see it as a niche market for european sovereignty stuff if absolutely necessary, hosted and run in Europe, sure. Same as Mistral. That's a niche which exists, there's probably enough room for a couple of modestly sized companies doing it... I guess?

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#12

Post by Schlagbohrer »

throwaw12 wrote: post #2

Didn't know the "Highest scoring EU model" has a low bar, lower than Qwen3.8-27B, but still congratulations on the milestone, hopefully next iterations will get better from here

It is surprising given how many parameters it has that it scores so low. But, hopefully this will build up domestic talent and understanding and let Europe compete on the world stage with this.

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#15

Post by Schlagbohrer »

thevinter wrote: post #9
amelius wrote: post #7

What I want is a model that is trained with data that is openly available, where the data is curated by academia. I don't want corporate crap in my AI (unless it has been filtered properly).

I'm ready to stand corrected, but I'm pretty positive that such a process would require 1) an insane amount of work and 2) wouldn't produce anything close to SOTA results because of the lack of training data. It is my understanding that - sadly - the insane amount of copyrighted works and corporate crap is a prerequisite for having a corpus that is big enough

I think these days even the frontier labs are using large amounts of synthetic data too, which must be worth it even though it seems like an Ouroborous.

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#16

Post by vrganj »

trvz wrote: post #3

As a European: I don’t care where an open weight model comes from.

That's a very limiting view of things. A model, even an open weight one, is never neutral, it is an encoding of a way of viewing the world.

What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding.

Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated.

I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default.

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#17

Post by walrus01 »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #14

I am still very surprised how absent India is from the LLM game.

Individual Indians are very much present in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I have a theory that the top 5% talent of Indian nationals who are legitimately qualified and skilled, for very logical reasons would much rather take a six-figure USD equivalent salary in EUR or USD and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that come with it rather than bootstrap an Indian domestic AI lab.

Re: Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

#20

Post by walrus01 »

nicman23 wrote: post #18
throwaw12 wrote: post #2

Didn't know the "Highest scoring EU model" has a low bar, lower than Qwen3.8-27B, but still congratulations on the milestone, hopefully next iterations will get better from here

i mean qwen3.8 is a technical marvel

3.8-flash-next quantized in a "large" Q4 that just fits in 128GB RAM even more so, in how close it can get to state of the art in a number of benchmarks. Or a large Q8 version of it that fits in under 190GB. Competing against things that are closed weights/opaque information about the model and might very well be 600B+ in size.
Post reply on HN