Live data from Hacker News

Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model

multiversecomputing.com

111–120 of 134 posts

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

#111
post #56

The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. From their about page: > At the heart of Multiverse's platform is CompactifAI, a compression technology that applies tensor networks, a mathematical framework from quantum physics, to the problem of AI model compression. This application was pioneered by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Román Orús and reduces the size of large language models by up to 80-95…

Just because you haven’t heard of them and they’re not American doesn’t mean they’re hot air. I got the privilege to meet their CEO in Paris as they were announcing their partnership with Axelera and we exchanged some stories. They are full of very smart people, and they got accepted in the EIC Accelerator which, while you may not have heard of it, is one of the most rigorous and difficult programs to get into as a s…

This is the classic EU thing - the much superior most rigorous program - that no one has ever heard of, that turns out products that are rebadges or clones of other stuff. China has been getting more and more impressive. These EU "experts" are literally rebadging Chinese open models. 15 years ago that would have been a wild concept. China is totally OK fast following with no shame. SpaceX clone, they are getting to re-usability faster than the EU etc.

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

#112
post #3

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

This is an oft-expressed refrain. But there are good reasons to not want to use Chinese models (or models from any adversary for that matter).

1. They may be trained, in theory, to inject subtle back-doors into certain kinds of generated code.

2. They may be also trained to include back-doors when deployed in public-facing services where user can provide text or image input.

3. Chained with (2) they may be also trained to exploit their inference environments, which though a big feat, not outside the capability of nation-state hackers.

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

#113

I might be misreading this. But they seem to heavily imply that they trained this model. Or at least want to give off the impression that that is the case. Otherwise the "Europe's Leading Model" line doesn't make much sense. Their bread and butter is to remove parameters from models [1] and I think this is GLM 5.2 with parameters removed. Its advertised in their changelog [2] as "capabilities are identical to GLM 5.2…

On Artificial Analysis it's listed as "Quasar 438B (max, based on GLM-5.2)" - so you see exactly right. Not sure if this was changed post publicity drive or not, this is the first I'm seeing about this model. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/quasar-438b

I don't remember that being there, but you know how memory can be. I checked the Wayback Machine and it has a snapshot of the page that does not mention it. The snapshot is from September 1st, not from yesterday, so perhaps they changed it before this announcement and my comment was made. But I personally don't think so.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260901084009/https://artificia...

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

#114
post #86
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually true though. Most Chinese models are fully able to chat about those and content filtering is just applied at serving time.

It's definitely at the model level. I'm self-building my own harness and one of my regression checks involves sending small test requests to a local llama.cpp instance of (Alibaba's (from Hangzhou)) Qwen. "What is the capital of...?" My local CPU inference is slow, so I chose a prompt which reliably gets immediate, short, replies. "Paris." "Rome." The Qwen response to "What is the capital of Taiwan?" was not immediat…

qwen: stumbles deepseek: Tapei glm: Tapei kimi: Tapei

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

#115
post #96
post #56

The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. From their about page: > At the heart of Multiverse's platform is CompactifAI, a compression technology that applies tensor networks, a mathematical framework from quantum physics, to the problem of AI model compression. This application was pioneered by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Román Orús and reduces the size of large language models by up to 80-95…

> The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. When they make being from Europe their whole personality, that shows how little value there is to the actual value proposition.

It's the perfect analogy, they are just the European middleman repackaging the AI model from Temu.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you haven’t heard of them and they’re not American doesn’t mean they’re hot air. I got the privilege to meet their CEO in Paris as they were announcing their partnership with Axelera and we exchanged some stories. They are full of very smart people, and they got accepted in the EIC Accelerator which, while you may not have heard of it, is one of the most rigorous and difficult programs to get into as a s…

This is the classic EU thing - the much superior most rigorous program - that no one has ever heard of, that turns out products that are rebadges or clones of other stuff. China has been getting more and more impressive. These EU "experts" are literally rebadging Chinese open models. 15 years ago that would have been a wild concept. China is totally OK fast following with no shame. SpaceX clone, they are getting to r…

Except that no, it doesn't churn "clones"; MVC is quite a serious company and working on far more interesting stuff than whatever shit the SaaS or ads company you're statistically likely working at is.

EIC churns out DeepTech, invests 2.5M nondilutive with funding horizons of 10+ years and larger equity-based programmes too. Multiverse is a quantum computing company working on energy-efficient AI algorithms. The EIC is the reason companies such as ICEYE (https://www.iceye.com/) can exist. The chips running all that inference going in those US datacenters being built? 99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)

You haven't heard about the EIC because they don't care about marketing to americans; their target market is European companies, not you. But sorry to say, the talent is in Europe; the only reason you've been getting that talent in the US is a better business ecosystem, and your current administration has been utterly destroying this while our leaders have been actually fixing our issues. So keep shitting on Europe from the top of that crumbling hill, we'll see you when you emigrate.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like people in other places couldn't solve this problem. Yes, the US pays more, but a lot of people would still prefer staying home, and it's not like they wouldn't be paid very well compared to the local salary. And besides, a lot of Indians in India are working for FAANG, and don't earn US money - I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech co…

> I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company. India doesn't have the same structure, existence and prevalence of VCs with large pools of available seed round and series A money that are necessary for a start-up to acquire enough funds to realistically train a model. Particularly with the hardware/datacenter costs involved in that. There's a reas…

I don't really have an special insight on India, but some of the biggest tech CEOs are Indian born and raised (Google, MS...) Surely they have the resources, connections and experience in how to build tech companies. In fact I'd be surprised if they were not involved in some capacity.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but considering they have the people, money, and connections, I would expect a lot more success stories.

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

#118
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. When they make being from Europe their whole personality, that shows how little value there is to the actual value proposition.

I instinctively distrust any company that makes their national origin the main selling point. To me that's a subtle signal that they cannot compete on technical merit.

Lots of American companies make a thing that they are American vs Chinese companies.

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

#119
post #97
post #51

When the weights are closed I don't believe any benchmark. I just got Qwen3.8-27B to score extra 10% on SWE Pro by adding a proxy in front of it that has few simple "harness like features": - when the model gets stuck it tells it to "go on" - when it sends no output, malformed json, slips to wrong tool use format, etc it asks it to "try again better" - detects repetition and tells the model. - injects a prompt about…

Have you posted the code to this proxy somewhere? I'm dabbling in custom harnesses and would love to learn from it.

Seconding this, would also like to hear more about the proxy.

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

#120
What will Europe do when American and Chinese AIs and robots render half of the European population obsolete? How do they come back from missing the boat on such a transformational technology? Europeans seem resigned to a future of being American and Chinese economic colonies.
Post reply on HN