upvote
At this point I'm starting to get scared that the hardware itself could get banned. We went from free personal computing to remote attestation to being priced out and now the threat of being literally regulated looms over us. Even if we amassed a small fortune and decided to spend it on our own inference-capable computers, we might find that we literally can't purchase the hardware.
reply
But it already is.

You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.

RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.

reply
>The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.

Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b

Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.

reply
> The world is a bit bigger than US and China

With respect to AI capabilities is it really?

I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.

reply
Mistral (French) for one but several governments have sponsored projects too
reply
Mistral in the EU, for one.
reply
Unfortunately Mistral is not close to the frontier. Their last release Mistral Medium 3.5 128B is near the performance[0] of QWEN-3.6-27B, a much smaller model that was released earlier.

It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.

[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.

reply
Within Spec Driven Development style coding for me Claude Sonnet 4.5 was the game changer and Mistral is I believe at that level already. GLM is allegedly also on par with even some of the Opus models, so if the US vendors would vanish tomorrow, there would be alternatives. Would I miss Opus 4.8 and the Claude Code harness? of course I would! But the world wouldn't stop.

What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.

reply
they already firmly in irrelevant territory
reply
> irrelevant territory

Not for the EU. Given the political importance of LLMs and the talent pool in France (let alone rest of the EU), I fully expect them to catch up.

reply