The issue with 'sovereign' is not about sneaky things a foreign entity might put in there, it's about control of the stack.
Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues, it's almost impossible to get some random European company to think about buying anything other than 'whatever US or China' are making.
There has to be very concerted push to make a difference.
Legal mandates around sovereignty (be very careful here) could make a difference.
But there will also be market reaction: US/China companies will bend on some level and provide things like 100% EU hosted and even comply with some data source stuff.
The only real path is to be more competitive as a continent.
> Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues
You clearly haven’t worked in enterprise in the EU. Location of data processor is the first thing they check. That’s why every major cloud has regions with different offerings, not just for HA and redundancy
That is a very good idea and there is a market for that, especially if a company manages to source the hardware and then install the stack on a german or EU customer site
Aleph Alpha is just a sad joke by now. The talent isn't there anymore, they never managed to catch up to the other labs, failed to deliver on several projects, and by now are just a cash grab for the investors.
Only if you think in terms of short term gains, but thinking in the long run, doesn't really matter if these models are crap today, all models will eventually be obsolete, unless we plateau hard on every aspect of the tech.
What matters is to have good sovereign models in 5, 10, 20 years time.
For the same reason it didn't matter whether coach makers were able to build carriages that went 5% faster when the automobile was introduced, and for the same reason it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time. Their window of opportunity will be long gone and the momentum elsewhere; most probably, the market will even have evolved further by then.
VW EV sales are up in South America, Canada and Europe. It's true that their total global numbers are down, but that's mainly because they lost like 30% in China. Which obviously sucks considering how big the Chinese market is, but then, the Chinese market is it's own sort of thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think your point is valid for a lot of traditional European car brands. Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand, but I suspect VW is one of the brands that will do just fine. Especially with the id polo coming out next year.
> Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand
Mercedes is doing something interesting with its level 3 DRIVE PILOT. As far as I know, it's the only autonomous driving system/auto pilot on the market that actually takes full legal responsibility for the vehicle and its actions. If you put a new Mercedes in self driving and it crashes, Mercedes takes full liability.
Yes, it currently only goes up to 100 kph and it will buzz you to take over if it can't guarantee prefect safety anymore. But this approach is really the only one I think is interesting. All this self driving shit is worthless to me if I'm still liable in the end. So I respect Mercedes for putting their money where their mouth is.
AI is here to stay - will be around for hundreds/millions of years. Whether company A is a few years ahead of company B is irrelevant. In 10 years time company A, who started the industry, may be gone completely - also irrelevant.
maybe to have a global market share, but there are plenty of players that picked up pace when they “decided” to build cars (Japan? South Korea? and many more) or electronics. Having a good sovereign model in 10/20 years might not need having the absolute best there is, and perhaps future optimizations will make building one not as prohibitively expensive as it is today. Keeping some sort of homebrew capacity now is definitely better than having none
> it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time
I mean, given the fuel prices it would be very nice, alongside more charging infrastructure in the EU. :(
Not to detract from the overall point, though to be honest, it's probably worthwhile to do improvements and refinements with the current technology, even if the future holds something vastly different. Both cause of gaining expertise and also maybe an improvement or two along the way, that might carry forward.
Like I haven't seen many steam locomotives around and for me the difference between saturated steam engines and superheated ones isn't very material in regards to transportation, but the latter is used in modern turbines.
Someone mad at this random guy who can't even fix his de domains SSL cert (cloudflare of course) destructively shitting on any efforts at doing something good.
Someone that builds things instead of merely "managing".
Someone pissed by this exact style of default github pfp business-person ruining this country. If they haven't left for SV already, in which case I hope that they will stay there.
And this isn't ad-hominem for lack of factual critic. The personal stuff _is_ the reason. How else do you call out someone driven by ego without mentioning them and their ego?
The guy is only ego. There is no substance to attack.
this is, because it can mean so much stuff that you can't really tell you are calling out their "ego" or just trolling.
Until you can at least open yourself to the possibility that there are better more inviting ways to talk to people online, you'd think this is just the natural way people talk online, but I'd say it's not. It's just an aesthetic choice.
I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.
Just open weights are not enough, I think as a nation state you'd at least want a whole sovereign training pipeline. Otherwise you are stuck when Kimi K4 stops releasing their weights.
But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.
We have lots of capable open weights models, but very few have actual datasets and pipelines open for reproducibility. This is a major issue that even if big companies addressed, policies could well just change, as you also acknowledge.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.
Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.
Open weight and -source models aren't without biases. Giving a model away for free would be a good way to distribute an agenda. With a sovereign model you can at least control the agenda and align it with your values.
It's not that talent isn't there anymore. It's that retards are at the helm everywhere and therefore talent is running away the first chance they have.
The absence of any comparison to Qwen3.8 Flash, another MoE model with a small-ish (6B) number of active parameters, is pretty striking. Instead, it's compared with Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B, a model released almost a full year ago.
I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...
It is a good approach to promote it as a German model. But I wonder if it really thinks like the German think. I speculate they just translated texts in other languages, likely English and Chinese, into German.
I just tried to play around with it on my RTX pro 6000 setup, it spends way too many tokens on overthinking stuff even if it’s able to catch the correct approach
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
petition to make this thread the official german jokes thread for this post, it's kind of annoying how everyone feels the need to make a top level comment for their oh-so-great "germans suck" joke.
Agree, and both are on the front page. Also, Show HN is usually for your own project, but this appears to be a blog post about someone else's project (albeit "a good friend").
I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.
I know this is a long standing joke, but I am 27 now, born and raised in Germany, and genuinely never had the opportunity to use a Fax machine. It honestly kind of bums me out because there is something that seems cool about Fax (being fully aware that it should be fully obsolete by now)
As a kid I interned at a bookstore, and before closing we'd write the book orders on a sheet of paper, slide it into the Fax machine to send to the book wholesale. I think the Fax printed out some kind of response a minute later.
Next day, the books would arrive. This was maybe 1996, but I thought it was pretty cool.
I was thinking about the use cases for Germany residents actually, but yes, you're right. A German AI model needs to be able to handle fax machines (there's a bit variety of them) and also needs to handle letters coming home. german image-to-text.
Was expecting that a "sovereign" AI model would at least use their own sovereign language (German) on the website as one of the options. Anyways, all the best and happy reunification day.
This is a blog post by some "random" dude right? The company webpage appears to be German (at least when accessed from Germany: https://aleph-alpha.com/)
German here. We are cheering for Mistral, which is making some good moves before the year is over, and Black Forest Labs for non-coding. But that's about it.
Is Germany sovereign? It outsourced its defence onto the USA. Recently Trump wanted more diesel; Germany insta-submitted, also because oddly enough Macron submitted before Germany (Macron is suspicious). Before that, Leyen committed to insta-submission with a deal that made europeans poorer (and perhaps Leyen benefits from that). Canada shows the way. Many of the smaller countries in the EU too, such as Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, to some extent Sweden as well. Every time I read "sovereign" here I have to object. Nothing is sovereign here. The whole hardware is definitely not sovereign. Perhaps some of the software is, but that's about it. Plus, who gets all the data? The big US mega-corporations sniff non-stop. Remember how Facebook sniffed Libgen and Anna's Archive dry etc..., then suddenly libgen went down. The US corporations act as huge global leeches on every step of the stair. And lobbyists benefit from this too.
His point about regulation and innovation is great and I wish more people thought like that.
One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.
We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.
The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.
I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.
The ignorant, hostile, negative, and, frankly, kinda racist comments here really are just a sad showing for the currently online crowd.
But anyway. I think the main oversight when dismissing this is that not every use-case is coding a SV-style startup app. That market is quite saturated, so it would make sense to create something locally for the use-cases currently underserved by LLMs.
We will probably learn more about what this can really do once quants become available that can be run by people without an SV salary (and the biases that come with that).
Right now one could run an open model for most government applications and it would be good enough, you just cannot trust any of these.
So having a sovereign controlled model audit the first one would basically act like a “trust adapter”.
If the second model is cheap and fast enough, there is a business model.
You don’t even need to audit all the intermediate steps, just tool calls and end results.
Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues, it's almost impossible to get some random European company to think about buying anything other than 'whatever US or China' are making.
There has to be very concerted push to make a difference.
Legal mandates around sovereignty (be very careful here) could make a difference.
But there will also be market reaction: US/China companies will bend on some level and provide things like 100% EU hosted and even comply with some data source stuff.
The only real path is to be more competitive as a continent.
You clearly haven’t worked in enterprise in the EU. Location of data processor is the first thing they check. That’s why every major cloud has regions with different offerings, not just for HA and redundancy
What matters is to have good sovereign models in 5, 10, 20 years time.
VW EV sales are up in South America, Canada and Europe. It's true that their total global numbers are down, but that's mainly because they lost like 30% in China. Which obviously sucks considering how big the Chinese market is, but then, the Chinese market is it's own sort of thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think your point is valid for a lot of traditional European car brands. Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand, but I suspect VW is one of the brands that will do just fine. Especially with the id polo coming out next year.
Mercedes is doing something interesting with its level 3 DRIVE PILOT. As far as I know, it's the only autonomous driving system/auto pilot on the market that actually takes full legal responsibility for the vehicle and its actions. If you put a new Mercedes in self driving and it crashes, Mercedes takes full liability.
Yes, it currently only goes up to 100 kph and it will buzz you to take over if it can't guarantee prefect safety anymore. But this approach is really the only one I think is interesting. All this self driving shit is worthless to me if I'm still liable in the end. So I respect Mercedes for putting their money where their mouth is.
AI is here to stay - will be around for hundreds/millions of years. Whether company A is a few years ahead of company B is irrelevant. In 10 years time company A, who started the industry, may be gone completely - also irrelevant.
I mean, given the fuel prices it would be very nice, alongside more charging infrastructure in the EU. :(
Not to detract from the overall point, though to be honest, it's probably worthwhile to do improvements and refinements with the current technology, even if the future holds something vastly different. Both cause of gaining expertise and also maybe an improvement or two along the way, that might carry forward.
Like I haven't seen many steam locomotives around and for me the difference between saturated steam engines and superheated ones isn't very material in regards to transportation, but the latter is used in modern turbines.
And who are you to be asking such questions?
Someone that builds things instead of merely "managing".
Someone pissed by this exact style of default github pfp business-person ruining this country. If they haven't left for SV already, in which case I hope that they will stay there.
> Aleph Alpha is just a sad joke by now.
And this isn't ad-hominem for lack of factual critic. The personal stuff _is_ the reason. How else do you call out someone driven by ego without mentioning them and their ego?
The guy is only ego. There is no substance to attack.
this is, because it can mean so much stuff that you can't really tell you are calling out their "ego" or just trolling.
Until you can at least open yourself to the possibility that there are better more inviting ways to talk to people online, you'd think this is just the natural way people talk online, but I'd say it's not. It's just an aesthetic choice.
But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.
The next thought is culture-specific workflows, requirements etc that are best trained into weights by people that actually understand those needs.
I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...
This means that it’s always on time, it uses acronyms for everything and when there’s a decision to be made, it sets up a committee.
Tell that to Deutch Bahn.
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
Yeah. It’s a German model.
Then what does it good at? Sending faxes?
Next day, the books would arrive. This was maybe 1996, but I thought it was pretty cool.
How is a 27B dense model bigger than a 78B MoE?
One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.
We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.
The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.
I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.
But anyway. I think the main oversight when dismissing this is that not every use-case is coding a SV-style startup app. That market is quite saturated, so it would make sense to create something locally for the use-cases currently underserved by LLMs.
We will probably learn more about what this can really do once quants become available that can be run by people without an SV salary (and the biases that come with that).