Mistral is clearly currently not competing for Frontier Model. Whether this is due to a lack of VC Funds or a lack of technical ability or the former arising from the latter would be interesting to know.
The top models are from startups. Among the FAANG only Google managed to get a Frontier model, and they litterally invented the architecture and have more money than they can possibly spend to throw at the problem. Facebook shows that even ungodly amounts of money don't get you there though.
So why did no EU based Startups succeed while two US start ups succeeded? I agree that that's a very important question the EU should ask. The Internet revolution was driven by US companies, and now AI will be as well, with Chinese Open Weights mixed in. The EU consistently can not turn its considerable economic output into fast moving tech firms.
They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...
They had Watson, remember, it won on jeopardy like 15 years ago? They've been at this for a long time
Maybe it's good at something else?
Upon closer inspection the $1B is (a) over 10 years, (b) mostly internal cross-billing between departments.
They had to start from scratch, but dont seem to have the management to be smart enough, to stop doing it in house. They could have just acquired a startup that could build a frontier model.
What is also very ironic since their whole bussiness for the last 15 years, has been buying companies a la CA Associates...
Their previous Watson branding and collapse of Watson expectations cost them one CEO, but the current CEO was part of the same team. They just dont learn....
ETH Zurich and EPFL universities recently put out an open model called Apertus (was on the HN front page a few months back), it's not a frontier model, but they built it properly regarding copyright and data transparency.
It might look a bit slow or old-fashioned, but focusing on doing things ethically and legally feels like a much better path than just joining the race to scrape everything.
Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.
Also, no, abandoning ethics is not an option, what a ridiculous suggestion.
Yes, if the premise was true but it’s not.
Also what are they building it for? I'd think it's to serve ads better or something like that. Maybe Muse Spark fits facebook's needs perfectly...
I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.
They will forever have superior weights?
There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.
1. SamA and his company has a well-deserved bad reputation and Anthropic got some early good PR for basically not being SamA.
2. Claude Code got early head space, Boris and crew basically "invented" this kind of agent, and so has first mover advantage despite its known reliability and cost issues.
3. Most people I talk to haven't even tried Codex for some reason
Also it's uncool to complain about downvotes.
And Zuck hasn't spent that much on AI yet. Half of that is projected spending for 2026.
As to whether it's all for nothing, Q1 2026 revenue was up 33% over Q1 last year, driven largely by...better AI-driven ad targeting. So the spending doesn't seem that crazy to me.
Might also just be the result of "good will" (that the company has deftly fostered). Other companies might learn from Anthropic in that regard.
That Google is dropping the ball so badly, or just disinterested in the coding side of things... is either a sign of incompetence, or a lack of interest in losing money in that space. I wish I knew which.