It's possible to be a waste of European money that could be better used elsewhere, though. I think the same about LeCun's company sucking up the little funding here.
> Europe absolutely needs a home-grown AI lab, especially with Pax Americana looking increasingly shaky.
The only problem (at least in the LLM space) is that you can do more in Europe by just getting the best Chinese Open weights model (do a finetune if you really want) and do more for cheaper than using Mistral.
There's been a ton of optimizations already, it hasn't remotely reduced demand even temporarily. More efficiency just makes the compute have even higher ROI per $ and watt spent.
With sufficient optimisation, there ought to be a tipping point beyond which local inference is good enough. And, sure, datacentre compute will still be needed for training but one of the biggest current uses will begin to taper off.
The question really is how soon we reach that tipping point, and whether it's before or after the current bubble runs out of steam for some other reason.
>there ought to be a tipping point beyond which local inference is good enough
There's no such ought really. Even at current levels you'd need like a 100x gain from here to approach current top proprietary models (probably a lot more for say Mythos or Mythos 2), and it's not like they are stoppng to improve. This is before we even account that you'd just be running 1 agent then, and not a swarm like you'd be able to in the cloud or that you can do only so much compression before you are losing out
The history of acquisitions mothballing the acquired assets or moving them off their original mission or letting them atrophy is too stark to support your optimism. Especially when nvidia has a direct incentive to to steer the ecosystem. For example are they going to highlight and surface alternative chip designs like grok? Or will model search mysteriously not find related models?
Nvidia doesn't exactly have Oracle's reputation when it comes to acquiring companies, but given its overall hostility towards competition and open source I can't blame people for being anxious about the news.
The most important resource for self-hosting LLMs is now under the control of a company that has very markedly kept the specialized hardware outside of the broader public's hands.
You're probably right. It was mostly hyperbole, but the older I get the more I think hyperbole does eventually come to pass in situations like this. It's gradual, though, not all at once.
Natural log cynicism and any cynicism about public corporations in our late-stage capitalism world is likely to look tame a year later. Or possibly too.
That's a good formalization of it. I will think you are a bit of a fool if you dont use AI but you guarantee you'll be a fool if you only use AI with no value added by yourself.
Fable has more parameters. In practice it's not yet clear which one would be better for different usecases yet but they are more different than one being strictly better.
Perhaps.. Mistral seems to be focussing more on LLM application rather than foundation models. Seeing that the latter may be becoming commodities, Mistral may come out ahead.
Flux 2 Dev Klein has practically been the best you could use on most commercial hardware so I really hope Flux 3 has a comparable updated open-weights model to it. if not it'd be a great loss to most hobbyists.
That's true, and often they diverge. But in this case I think the opinions within YC itself and in the HN community at large are more or less the same - we all want open-weight models.
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