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Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

multiversecomputing.com

31–40 of 134 posts

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

#32

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 Qu…

> That's a niche which exists

It's not a small niche. Anything touching European resident personal data must only be done by Euro AI Act compliant AIs. So, hosted in Europe at least (unclear to me rn, would love to learn the exact criteria).

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

#33
post #32

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 Qu…

> That's a niche which exists It's not a small niche. Anything touching European resident personal data must only be done by Euro AI Act compliant AIs. So, hosted in Europe at least (unclear to me rn, would love to learn the exact criteria).

But is it compliant if someone runs, for example, self-hosted GLM5.3 on euro owned and administered hardware that's located in Europe? That would remove a lot of the incentive for there to be EU labs building models.

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

#34
post #3

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

I hope you're aware that it's likley in the future open weight models will output tokens/commands that aren't in your interest. It could be that models are trained with spionage in mind and models could only target specific input token patterns, time zones, ip addresses, names etc... You will be able to see the output tokens but things will become so complex that you won't notice its intentions. Maybe there will be some sort of output token scanning software/llm (let's call it a modern form of a virus scanner) that validates intentions. In the end, I'm just trying to say that open weight means you have a black box in front of you that you don't know what it does. Therefore, the training material of open weight models should be known. While it doesn't matter where the model comes from, it certainly matters whether you trust those people if you don't have the training material.

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

#35
post #3

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

It's more important to have ownership into them, they're turning into powerfull tools that we have already seen cut off in the private sector on a whim. Having our own that is comparable (this is a nice first step) is better than Alibaba for example just not releasing the rest.

As with all of the EU's dependancies on Tech with the US, the idea of "I don't care where my DNS servers are" is starting to be an oversight.

But thanks for your opinion.

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

#36
post #3

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

As a non-European, I care. I definitely want choice in this matter, as too many things can be baked into models that we can't really know until it comes up.

For instance, I heard one of the Chinese models has some interesting "history" "facts" built into it. That's major, and can influence a lot more than just asking it for that particular history lesson.

I don't want just 1 LLM. I want a great LLM from every major region. I will probably still prefer my own region, but I still want the others to be an option.

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

#37
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>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. I don't want AI models to reflect any kind of values whatsoever. I have my own views - thank you - and I don't need other throwing their values in my face using AI. I prefer AI models not being trained ideologically.

Unfortunately, AI models are trained on humans, and so they're getting that whether we like it or not. I'd also prefer it to be neutral, but I don't think it's possible and the second-best option is to have models from multiple regions and balance things out.

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

#39

How can it be that a 438B model is worse than Qwen3.8-27B? Are these benchmarks totally gamed?

Training data plays a huge role. As an example, Qwen 3 was generally considered a significant improvement over Qwen 2.5, but the architecture only had minor tweaks. The major change was the quantity and quality of training data they used for Qwen 3.

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

#40

I wish for this company to have great models. I am glad to see such good scores. I see they have a HuggingFace account[0] and they fine-tuned GPT-OSS, Nemotron, and Qwen, in the past under new names. There are some things about it that make me worry though. • They don't indicate the active parameter count, or indicate whether they pretrained the model. It could be a MiniMax M3 finetuning, as the parameter count almos…

"quantum algorithms" that would put them directly on a blacklist if I had one. They might as well directly promote their stuff with Cold Fusion and Snake Oil.
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