Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by spindump8930 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #116

glzone1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Care to comment on this model from a quite serious company being labeled as derived from GLM?

Also, do you have a source for: "99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)"

For Hailo, the best I can find is https://hailo.ai/products/ai-accelerators/hailo-10h-m-2-ai-a...

Which states that this is a 40 TOPS int4 PCIe device, not what you'd put in a datacenter and certainly not what can run a frontier class model (or the model above). Embedded devices for inference are really cool! But that's the opposite end of scale for what goes into a data center.

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

#132

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

spindump8930 wrote: post #131

scrollaway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Care to comment on this model from a quite serious company being labeled as derived from GLM? Also, do you have a source for: "99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)" For Hailo, the best I can find is https://hailo.ai/products/ai-accelerators/hailo-10h-m-2-ai-a... Which states that this is a 40 TOPS int4 PCIe device, not what you'd put in a datacenter and certainly not wha…

I was sharing the EIC backed ones, but it's fair that in a datacenter it's more likely to be Axelera (or vsora/semidynamics if you start digging into earlier-stage competitors). Nvidia is the only American company selling AI chips to datacenters at scale but they're a huge supply chain risk so it's most DCs don't do single-supplier either way.

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

#133

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #132

spindump8930 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to comment on this model from a quite serious company being labeled as derived from GLM? Also, do you have a source for: "99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)" For Hailo, the best I can find is https://hailo.ai/products/ai-accelerators/hailo-10h-m-2-ai-a... Which states that this is a 40 TOPS int4 PCIe device, not what you'd put in a datacenter and certainly not wha…

I was sharing the EIC backed ones, but it's fair that in a datacenter it's more likely to be Axelera (or vsora/semidynamics if you start digging into earlier-stage competitors). Nvidia is the only American company selling AI chips to datacenters at scale but they're a huge supply chain risk so it's most DCs don't do single-supplier either way.

You'd need to compare by volume. And when you do that - unfortunately - NV is by far the largest supplier. 'Most DCs' are effectively single-supplier. And I wish it weren't so. This is the hard one to crack, NV needs credible competition. AMD and Intel are the only two majors that potentially could do this but they're both way behind where they should have been today.

I remember doing my first bit of 'shader repurposing' a long time ago thinking 'wow, I wonder whether Intel realizes this graphics card is the more powerful processor in my computer'. Back then (in the pre-CUDA) days you had to contort yourself in the worst possible ways to get any kind of unintended computation done but when it worked it was amazing. Since those days NV has been pumping enormous effort into building out that miniscule head start that they had in the days of 'Brook' and the subsequent release of CUDA. It is going to cost a lot of money to duplicate that, and even more to compete with NV on what is now their home turf. But I really wished someone with very deep pockets would do just that.

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

#134

Post by vrganj » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #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.

Sell them the machines they need to make the machines to run their AI?