I do not want open weight models from China to be the only viable locally hosted things (deepseek v4 flash 0731 Q8, qwen 3.8-flash-next Q8, GLM-5.3-Flash) in the under 200GB RAM class.

I want to see things like Mistral and Laguna (non-CN) succeed. I have spent about a week using Laguna S 2.1 as a test and while I wasn't blown away by its capabilities, it's also totally acceptable for many purposes.

I do hope these Quasar people learn that if you announce a new model and it already performs worse than things people can go download from huggingface, and/or buy access to with very cheap token plans via openrouter or opencode.. If your new model is API only and people can't download/examine it, it will get very little uptake and real world use.

I can see it as a niche market for european sovereignty stuff if absolutely necessary, hosted and run in Europe, sure. Same as Mistral. That's a niche which exists, there's probably enough room for a couple of modestly sized companies doing it... I guess?

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em500 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I understood from informal chatter that researchers in the top Chinese labs are pretty open with sharing knowledge with each other. Additionally, it seems that anywhere between 30-50% of key researchers in the top US labs are ethnically Chinese. I wonder if this situation might give Chinese labs/researches some advantage just due to language and informal networks. Chinese researchers can understand all the English research, but research in Chinese is far less accessible to non-Chinese.

	▲	yorwba 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Chinese ML researchers primarily publish in English and only secondarily in Chinese. For example, take the Qwen-3.8-Next blog post https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8-flash-next (which apparently doesn't include the language choice in the URL, so you'll need to switch to the 简体中文 translation manually). Even in the Chinese version, the "Hugging Face", "Tech Report" and "FlashQLA" links point to English documents, and the ModelScope link has a brief flash of English content before autotranslation kicks in to turn it into Chinese. I'm not sure what is used on the Qwen Discord, but I would guess it's a mix of languages. Personal communication is of course different from official documentation, but a researcher who wants to establish a working relationship with Chinese colleagues could easily do so while communicating entirely in English.

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ovi256 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's a niche which exists

It's not a small niche. Anything touching European resident personal data must only be done by Euro AI Act compliant AIs. So, hosted in Europe at least (unclear to me rn, would love to learn the exact criteria).

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walrus01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But is it compliant if someone runs, for example, self-hosted GLM5.3 on euro owned and administered hardware that's located in Europe? That would remove a lot of the incentive for there to be EU labs building models.

	▲	em500 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems that Mistral is moving in that direction anyway: "Our customers particularly value us for pioneering open models. Open weights give them what mission-critical work demands: the ability to see inside a model, adapt it, and retain the intelligence they build with it. This is why we are enthusiastic contributors to the Open Secure AI Alliance and NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition. We are now extending that openness beyond our own models. Mistral’s platform will support third-party open models, starting with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2." [August 11, 2026] https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...