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)
Fax was always awkward and weird. Resolution sucked and the paper handling was unreliable.
They were never common. They were mostly business tools, and consumers never wanted them. Sometimes you'd be required to send someone a fax, and you'd have to go to an office store. (And pay rather a lot; dollars per page.)
I hope you get to give one a try some day, for kicks, but the thrill will wear off fast.
Are you sure about that? I remember we had one at home when I grew up, so I assumed they were very common at the time. (And it's not like we had this crazy business driven family use of it.)
About the best data point I can cite is that I never saw one in a TV show.I don't think the Huxtables had a home fax machine. (Though maybe I just watched the wrong programs, and we're talking about a very long time ago so memory could fail.)
Now that you mention it, I think I only remember one from the simpsons.
But based on [1] my mom really was an outlier for getting a fax machine. Mabye we had enough contact with beurocracy to make it work it. :D Even in 1995 only 1.5 million out of 36 million (4,1%) households had one. (Although I remember it from ~2000, so too bad the data doesn't go there.)
For the US with 14 million out of 98 million households (14%) fax machines were more popular for ordinary households than in germany. (But home-use was never the issue in the fax debate anyway, just fun facts :) )
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 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.
I suspect there are a lot of German companies that have thousands of documents that describe their software/product. Adding or changing a feature means you have to ask 20 people whether there might something that can break some edge case behavior for which no (automatic) test exists. In this case, it would be nice to have a virtual employee who knows the content of all documents.
I even experienced the opposite case: Some feature was first rejected since everyone agreed that it would break some behavior. After talking to several people again, I discovered that the use case which required this behavior did not exist anymore and had been officially phased out years before. Maybe, some RAG LLM could have told me, based on company documents, that there is some edge case that can be removed making the way free for the new feature.
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
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.
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.
You want to, of course. There are several multi-billion dollar programs to subsidize fabs starting european offshoots. But so far not very successful, and it's not like one endeavour is blocking the other here.
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.
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.
Because if you can't build the model from scratch you don't have a model. Open weights are nice but fixed in time. This isn't a technology that stays static, it improves, and sovereignty means being able to continue to improve independently.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sure. The founder has left, massive capital has been pumped into the company without real profits ever materialising, there were reports of spurious connections to local politicians, big contracts for government-cleared AI that never turned into an actually useful product, and the only thing that seems to get wheels turning again is the involvement of Cohere.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I am a big proponent of European independence and technology, but Aleph Alpha never quite managed to live up to their promises (and potential!) A lot of inertia has been silently fizzled out here, and that's sad.
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.
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").
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.
Hey, I worked on pre-training data Kolibri. We spent considerable time and effort to go beyond just translating. For example by building a pipeline that processes Common Crawl dumps specifically for German. You might be interested in a related blog post: https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/sauerkraut-not-burgers-why-g...
This is an interesting question, Chinese is way more compact in Character count vs English (about 40%?), let alone german, but yeah.. Chinese makes up for it with… total character count that runs into the thousands…
Very long words in German are just compounds, made from individual words or morphemes. It is the same as in English if you remove spaces. Subtokens will be equivalent with or without examples.
Somewhat hilariously, our model is actually surprisingly bad at telling jokes in German. Guess that's not required to solve tasks in training environments.
Disclaimer: I part of the team that trained Kolibri
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 require an essay or a book.
We don’t know how to innovate responsibly, and the underlying reason is that we don’t know how to have nuanced public discourse. Everyone must stake out the most extreme position and if you attempt to inject nuance on any issue both sides shout you down.
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.
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943034, but we've since merged the threads, so I've moved it into the subthread which is specifically about the paper being responded to.)
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but this post did get classified that way. That's why the software flagged it.
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.
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).
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...
Qwen3.8 27B scored notably higher in most of the provided benchmarks, including the German-specific ones. The only "downside" is that inference is much more costly and slow, since it's a dense model.
Qwen3.8 Flash-Next appears to usually "benchmark higher" than 27B, while remaining fast.
I'm sure I could dig up the equivalent benchmarks for Flash and do the comparison myself, but as far as inference goes, it's messy. Consider that Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher than Qwen3.6 on some of the German-specific benchmarks.
So it seems superficially plausible that Qwen3.8 Flash-Next might not be "27B but faster" in the ways that are important for this model. Or it could just "be superior" in all ways.
Either way, I don't think an LLM has to be "the best" at anything to be worthwhile, necessarily. And I kind of distrust benchmarks on top of that, so...
That is what stood out to me as well. Qwen 3.8 Flash can run on very limited hardware as well and it is at least as good as Sonnet 5 in benchmarks like DeepSWE. With its n-gram design you can get flash next running on very limited GPU resources, as little as 16GB of VRAM.
People follow the latest frontier lab models with great attention and migrate to the next big model on their subscriptions. Meanwhile these local models have quietly gotten REALLY good. It is not even an exaggeration. It has happened in the last couple of months.
"Local model you can run at 40 t/s on a gaming machine that is better than Opus 4.6" is way less exciting than "OpenAI IS DOING CRIME!!! OpenAI SOLVED NAVIER STOKES. DARIO SAYS GLM 5.3 BAD! SLOW DOWN THE FRONTIER!".
(edit: also... totally ignore that 27B dense column over there where Qwen 3.8 27B beats Kolibri on nearly every single benchmark. Why would I choose to run this model?)
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
It depends on the use case, but I believe SLMs can do great with smaller tasks. People got so attached to 'general purpose' that they forgot software can be designed for specific, smaller use cases.
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.
The paper explains absolutely everything as if it was a tutorial "how to made your own modern agentic LLM". They even tell how they made their dataset. https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf ; It's the first time I see this level of openness.
In my opinion not being open about which data is ingested and trained on, and trying to make that a repeatable thing for a third party, is not worth being called "open". Glad they did that.
to be fair, this discussion has been had numerous times here and the industry has arrived on "open-weight" to describe the practice of releasing the post-training weights in an open manner but not releasing the data it was trained on.
That's what they call this and I think it's a pretty clear definition these days to people in the industry.
Be cautious what you wish for. Tools don't tell you what to do with them.
Open source LLMs "democratize" access to the "intelligence booster" that is AI. But while that has several benefits, it also has several downsides.
Humanity has the serious problem of being underdeveloped in the "spiritual" department. Ethics is often considered some sort of lifestyle choice, but it's actually the difference between order and chaos in a society.
Everybody being able to do anything means somebody will be able to do something you don't like. At an arbitrary scale.
Ah, didn't think of this. Some rogue militia group might try to use this LLM (or create their own LLM based on this work) to help them create biological weapons or to do a mass hacking the infrastructure of targeted country.
Wonder what safeguards Kolibri uses to prevent this? Or if they even can
Chemical and biological warfare is hard. A cult in Japan created a mass casualty event using nerve gas. Which is the only somewhat "successful" terrorist WMD attack I know of. Knowledge of how to create these weapons isn't new. Guns and bombs are the most widely used terror weapons for a reason.
The hard part is probably finding the lab equipment and chemicals without being noticed, and choosing not to use it to manufacture drugs instead which would be much more profitable
What's stopping them from using claude today? What could anyone possibly do to stop them from using open models? This line of thought seems like corporate/political/pr pandering more than a meaningful concern.
eh, they are also used extensively in medical research using alpha fold, and in math, and in legal for one thing. And this is of course only the beginning, and IMHO, it'd take a lack of foresight to not start putting layers and layers of safeguards now.
Yeah, to me the hugging face hacking is a harbinger of what's to come, not just in the world of tech but eventually to other fields too.
If I described a computer to you in 1998 I'd have said "they are also used extensively in medical research using alpha fold, and in math, and in legal for one thing." Maybe not alpha fold, idk if that's some new thing. But you get my point? They're a very useful tool, sometimes it feels like magic what we can do with them... But it's not magic. That's why I said magic wand, the OP was implying LLMs can (or soon can) manipulate matter at an atomic level. That's orders of magnitude removed from where we are and I disagree that there's any evidence that LLMs will inevitably reach that point in our lifetimes.
The main thing that bugs me about the risk's discussion around AI is the lack of specificity. Commenters here have a good grasp of the risks around finding vulnerabilities faster than they can be patched. That's good and it matches the applicability of LLMs to coding.
But the applicability and the ROI of LLMs for other use cases than coding is a lot squishier. Also correspondingly the risks are unspecific.
As for what to do, ethical disclosure of vulnerabilities provided a good framework for disclosing software vulnerabilities discovered with the assistance of lLMs. What is going to be novel and calls for our spiritual development in other domains?
You're right, people weirdly lack imagination on what "higher intelligence" (minus ethics) actually affords you, let's have a look:
What do average people currently want? They're taught, the most important thing was being rich. So they will ask their AI to make them rich. Most real life ways to get there are "sketchy" to say the least, usually downright unethical and anti-social, but US society turns a blind eye when the "Wolf of Wall Street" comes out on top and the schemes don't easily fit into average people's abilities of moral judgement.
-> Large parts of US society suddenly engaging in all kinds of "semi-legal/hyper-illegal" fraud schemes, at the expense of already saturated environmental and societal resilience. Guaranteed collapse.
Or, let's get rid of those pesky neighbors/wrong-colored people/annoying opinions? Again, "legal" is a pretty squishy concept and only really applies when you don't have the legal expertise to get around it. Now you can.
Or, look at the basics: what is "real"? You only "know" because you trust certain people and institutions. Generative AI can help with that /s.
It's not only about "building weapons of mass destruction". It's about doing the same shit as usual, but a thousand times faster/amplified. Look up poly-/metacrisis for starters. Going faster with AI when there's a wall in front of you isn't the best idea.
This is analogous to the problem of spam, which is a problem about five minutes younger than email. Before spam you had to buy ads in the back pages of magazines you think target vulnerable demographics. Meta already spews fraudulent ads in horrific volume.
In other words, ambitious frauds have already explored all of the angles and bought all the ads. At worst, LLMs will create a few more successful but less ingenious frauds.
Whenever classic p(doom) sentiments are explained through a text with obvious LLM markers, I wonder whether I am looking at a superhuman persuasion attempt.
..or maybe the commenter did look at superhuman persuasion long enough to believe it would be best to channel those ever the same fear fantasies from the LLM through their account to the reader.
On a more serious note, just look at the doom premises here: "Large parts of US society suddenly going criminal" is from the movie "The Purge", I think. It is fiction.
The idea that generative AI takes away our ability to find out reality. ... I don't know. People write about that a lot, but it still seems very far fetched.
Maybe through some terminally online overconsumption, like with social media? I wouldn't know.
With new AI capabilities we will have to adjust, I am sure. Media, science, education and law are changing very visibly right now. Those p(doom) narrations just seem to be pre-IPO hype though.
It is just so so dangerous. That is why they want to go public and only want to care about optimizing for the next quarter ...right before breaking into AGI. /s
I find it odd that more people don't realize that we are talking about risk of elevated *general intellectual-domain capabilities* as a resource. To be clear, I'm not claiming that LLM + RF is necessarily THE technology that poses the risk, the risk is in recursive self-improvement and whatever technologies will result.
It's very clear to that any specifics couldn't capture the risks, because the capabilities, including the risks, are one level higher than any specific techonolgy. It is the process of advancing technology itself, in accelerating speed, that poses the risk.
The reason I use coding and vulnerabilities as an example is that it is a concrete example. It is what people pay for now when they buy AI. And the risks are specific and can be examined in detail. Some threads on this board currently show that even these more concrete and specific risks are often overblown, with LLMs finding low risk bugs and sucking up resources to evaluate and fix them.
Here you are claiming that AI products are going to reach AGI or end or RSI in the foreseeable future. Of course you can't "capture the risks" with specifics because those are inherently unspecific futures. It's a bit like saying when we invent antigravity all hell will break loose.
I would believe those future risks more if there were a progression of risks. What other than finding vulns has those characteristics?
Of course openness is only worse than leaving everything under the control of a select cabal of you believe that cabal to be more ethical than the rest of us.
Proliferation of data doesn't mean proliferation of the thing itself.
There's a massive barrier between knowing how to build a nuke and actually building it.
Also, isn't proliferation the basis for MAD? Well if we believe in that, naturally it means that the world would be safest if every individual had their own nuke ;)
Yes, a "select" (rather, self-selected) elite "controlling" AI according to their wishes, what could go wrong?
Clearly not a "better" scenario. The real problem though seems people feigning helplessness? You can't leave society "to its own". You are part of it and go where it goes. So better start steering.
When access to AI gives you abilities you cannot use responsibly, you shouldn't have access to that. Just like you shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or fly a plane or command a rocket without proper guardrails, safeguards, prerequisites, etc.
"General" intelligence isn't present in humans, why does it need to be in AI?
> When access to AI gives you abilities you cannot use responsibly
I don't think this is realistically a problem at all. It just makes certain types of research cheaper and less time-consuming. And, again, this is also a problem with the american services.
> Humanity has the serious problem of being underdeveloped in the "spiritual" department.
Not arguing that we shouldn't strive to do far far better here, better is by our own imagining. There is no development scale. There are no aliens or prior non human civilizations to compare against. So we're not underdeveloped. We are as we are. For all we know we're at peak capacity and humanity will never be better.
Such a crazy change from the times of Luminous, when they published a three pager with a claim that the model is similar good as „gpt 3“ (which??) with some graphs without y axis.
Isnt OLMO basically open like this? My understanding is people have recreated the model from the same data sources with repeatable responses, or reasonably close to the original (since LLMs never answer the same).
are there any plans to add French in a future version, or will Kolibri remain bilingual? (English/German). The domains include industry/aerospace, so there would be some demand for French, presumably.
While it's not perhaps clear to me that this is a true Show HN, I enjoyed the writeup and it's good to see our German colleagues across the pond taking a good shot at this. I also appreciated the brief description on the Merlin-Arthur protocol - seems like a clever way to try to tackle the "I don't know" problem.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 75.1 ms ] threadThen what does it good at? Sending faxes?
They were never common. They were mostly business tools, and consumers never wanted them. Sometimes you'd be required to send someone a fax, and you'd have to go to an office store. (And pay rather a lot; dollars per page.)
I hope you get to give one a try some day, for kicks, but the thrill will wear off fast.
Are you sure about that? I remember we had one at home when I grew up, so I assumed they were very common at the time. (And it's not like we had this crazy business driven family use of it.)
> I never saw one in a TV show
Now that you mention it, I think I only remember one from the simpsons.
But based on [1] my mom really was an outlier for getting a fax machine. Mabye we had enough contact with beurocracy to make it work it. :D Even in 1995 only 1.5 million out of 36 million (4,1%) households had one. (Although I remember it from ~2000, so too bad the data doesn't go there.)
For the US with 14 million out of 98 million households (14%) fax machines were more popular for ordinary households than in germany. (But home-use was never the issue in the fax debate anyway, just fun facts :) )
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
I even experienced the opposite case: Some feature was first rejected since everyone agreed that it would break some behavior. After talking to several people again, I discovered that the use case which required this behavior did not exist anymore and had been officially phased out years before. Maybe, some RAG LLM could have told me, based on company documents, that there is some edge case that can be removed making the way free for the new feature.
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
It's on the blog post by Tejas Kumar [1], when the viewport width is narrow.
https://tej.as/blog/aleph-alpha-kolibri
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.
The annoying part of optical matrix multiplication is the conversion from electronic to optic and back.
Why not use electron-optics for matrix multiplication and use dynodes for amplification.
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.
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.
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.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I am a big proponent of European independence and technology, but Aleph Alpha never quite managed to live up to their promises (and potential!) A lot of inertia has been silently fizzled out here, and that's sad.
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.
We also talk more about German pre-training data in the tech report: https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf section 2.3.2.2.
Disclaimer: I part of the team that trained Kolibri
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 require an essay or a book.
We don’t know how to innovate responsibly, and the underlying reason is that we don’t know how to have nuanced public discourse. Everyone must stake out the most extreme position and if you attempt to inject nuance on any issue both sides shout you down.
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.
How is a 27B dense model bigger than a 78B MoE?
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but this post did get classified that way. That's why the software flagged it.
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).
I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...
Qwen3.8 27B scored notably higher in most of the provided benchmarks, including the German-specific ones. The only "downside" is that inference is much more costly and slow, since it's a dense model.
Qwen3.8 Flash-Next appears to usually "benchmark higher" than 27B, while remaining fast.
I'm sure I could dig up the equivalent benchmarks for Flash and do the comparison myself, but as far as inference goes, it's messy. Consider that Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher than Qwen3.6 on some of the German-specific benchmarks.
So it seems superficially plausible that Qwen3.8 Flash-Next might not be "27B but faster" in the ways that are important for this model. Or it could just "be superior" in all ways.
Either way, I don't think an LLM has to be "the best" at anything to be worthwhile, necessarily. And I kind of distrust benchmarks on top of that, so...
People follow the latest frontier lab models with great attention and migrate to the next big model on their subscriptions. Meanwhile these local models have quietly gotten REALLY good. It is not even an exaggeration. It has happened in the last couple of months.
"Local model you can run at 40 t/s on a gaming machine that is better than Opus 4.6" is way less exciting than "OpenAI IS DOING CRIME!!! OpenAI SOLVED NAVIER STOKES. DARIO SAYS GLM 5.3 BAD! SLOW DOWN THE FRONTIER!".
(edit: also... totally ignore that 27B dense column over there where Qwen 3.8 27B beats Kolibri on nearly every single benchmark. Why would I choose to run this model?)
What is the upper bound on the value of more intelligence applied to your problem domain?
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.
That's what they call this and I think it's a pretty clear definition these days to people in the industry.
to be a bit more exact
It’s seemed crazy to me that anyone thought these could stay closed or even SHOULD be closed source.
Open source LLMs "democratize" access to the "intelligence booster" that is AI. But while that has several benefits, it also has several downsides.
Humanity has the serious problem of being underdeveloped in the "spiritual" department. Ethics is often considered some sort of lifestyle choice, but it's actually the difference between order and chaos in a society.
Everybody being able to do anything means somebody will be able to do something you don't like. At an arbitrary scale.
Wonder what safeguards Kolibri uses to prevent this? Or if they even can
Miscreants with even half a braincell will find themselves in illegal drugs business over terrorism.
Political and religious fanatics with even a half a braincell figure out terrorism will only damage their cause.
People who end up as terrorists have already failed the two above tests.
Given enough smarts, you can simulate anything. Quantum AI is an active goal.
I think we should stay in reality for now. They write good rust and bad emails.
Yeah, to me the hugging face hacking is a harbinger of what's to come, not just in the world of tech but eventually to other fields too.
But the applicability and the ROI of LLMs for other use cases than coding is a lot squishier. Also correspondingly the risks are unspecific.
As for what to do, ethical disclosure of vulnerabilities provided a good framework for disclosing software vulnerabilities discovered with the assistance of lLMs. What is going to be novel and calls for our spiritual development in other domains?
What do average people currently want? They're taught, the most important thing was being rich. So they will ask their AI to make them rich. Most real life ways to get there are "sketchy" to say the least, usually downright unethical and anti-social, but US society turns a blind eye when the "Wolf of Wall Street" comes out on top and the schemes don't easily fit into average people's abilities of moral judgement.
-> Large parts of US society suddenly engaging in all kinds of "semi-legal/hyper-illegal" fraud schemes, at the expense of already saturated environmental and societal resilience. Guaranteed collapse.
Or, let's get rid of those pesky neighbors/wrong-colored people/annoying opinions? Again, "legal" is a pretty squishy concept and only really applies when you don't have the legal expertise to get around it. Now you can.
Or, look at the basics: what is "real"? You only "know" because you trust certain people and institutions. Generative AI can help with that /s.
It's not only about "building weapons of mass destruction". It's about doing the same shit as usual, but a thousand times faster/amplified. Look up poly-/metacrisis for starters. Going faster with AI when there's a wall in front of you isn't the best idea.
In other words, ambitious frauds have already explored all of the angles and bought all the ads. At worst, LLMs will create a few more successful but less ingenious frauds.
"Ambitious frauds" haven't "explored all the angles".
You imply "LLMs" to be and stay less intelligent than humans, in particular yourself. You're mistaken.
..or maybe the commenter did look at superhuman persuasion long enough to believe it would be best to channel those ever the same fear fantasies from the LLM through their account to the reader.
On a more serious note, just look at the doom premises here: "Large parts of US society suddenly going criminal" is from the movie "The Purge", I think. It is fiction.
The idea that generative AI takes away our ability to find out reality. ... I don't know. People write about that a lot, but it still seems very far fetched.
Maybe through some terminally online overconsumption, like with social media? I wouldn't know.
With new AI capabilities we will have to adjust, I am sure. Media, science, education and law are changing very visibly right now. Those p(doom) narrations just seem to be pre-IPO hype though.
It is just so so dangerous. That is why they want to go public and only want to care about optimizing for the next quarter ...right before breaking into AGI. /s
It's very clear to that any specifics couldn't capture the risks, because the capabilities, including the risks, are one level higher than any specific techonolgy. It is the process of advancing technology itself, in accelerating speed, that poses the risk.
Here you are claiming that AI products are going to reach AGI or end or RSI in the foreseeable future. Of course you can't "capture the risks" with specifics because those are inherently unspecific futures. It's a bit like saying when we invent antigravity all hell will break loose.
I would believe those future risks more if there were a progression of risks. What other than finding vulns has those characteristics?
There's a massive barrier between knowing how to build a nuke and actually building it.
Also, isn't proliferation the basis for MAD? Well if we believe in that, naturally it means that the world would be safest if every individual had their own nuke ;)
But the alternative just seems… so much worse to me?
A select few groups gating access to the ability to do everything seems like neo-fuedalism in the making.
And to be fair even the gating that we do have (daybreak, CVP, etc.) is already being circumvented via keys being stolen and sold on the dark web.
Clearly not a "better" scenario. The real problem though seems people feigning helplessness? You can't leave society "to its own". You are part of it and go where it goes. So better start steering.
When access to AI gives you abilities you cannot use responsibly, you shouldn't have access to that. Just like you shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or fly a plane or command a rocket without proper guardrails, safeguards, prerequisites, etc.
"General" intelligence isn't present in humans, why does it need to be in AI?
I don't think this is realistically a problem at all. It just makes certain types of research cheaper and less time-consuming. And, again, this is also a problem with the american services.
What do you mean "cannot"? As in you are granted abilities that have no responsible use?
You live in a curated world and rarely or never encounter such things. Precisely because your environment is curated that way.
Look at how you can't buy WMDs. They have no responsible use for you.
As is shown to us by filthy rich people every day.
Or did you mean the burglar in the fawellas?
Not arguing that we shouldn't strive to do far far better here, better is by our own imagining. There is no development scale. There are no aliens or prior non human civilizations to compare against. So we're not underdeveloped. We are as we are. For all we know we're at peak capacity and humanity will never be better.
Why expose yourself to this liability?
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943034, but we're merging the threads.)
Bravo team!
I felt like a learnt a lot of details about the entire process. Questions arose during my reading, and searching for the answers led to more learning.
No marketing BS, lots of actual information. And their level of openness is really neat!