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Short comments... - GPT 5.5 consistently the best, an opinion who gets me constant downvotes here by the Anthropic Marketeer strike force... - China is going

Short comments... - GPT 5.5 consistently the best, an opinion who gets me constant downvotes here by the Anthropic Marketeer strike force... - China is going to eat the US lunch on AI - What have European universities and companies been doing? Its like if, on a parallel past/future, Nikola Tesla and Edison would have created flying Cyberpunk machines, while Europeans researchers, would be getting together to request EU funds, for investigation on how to breed faster horses. - If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired?

kristopolous 4mo ago
They did muse spark ... it's not garbage. 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...
- jansan 4mo ago
  Mo Bitar said something like "Meta's LLM is the one you use if you accidentially hit the wrong button in WhatsApp. Its user base is fat-finger phone users."
  - kristopolous 4mo ago
    Understood - they're just doing other things. Maybe custom ad rewriting for a target audience or some kind of deep analytics insight into user behavior or translations that optimizes for maximizing purchasing habits over literary accuracy ... I'm just saying their incentives are elsewhere and maybe Muse is serving them well. I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.
  - tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
    As comparison the WHOLE NASA budget is 24 billion. Meta burned 10x that on AI...
Certhas 4mo ago
None of these models come from universities, European or otherwise. 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.
- kristopolous 4mo ago
  I'm actually more curious about IBM. Their granite series appears to be nowhere close to competitive. 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?
  - greenavocado 4mo ago
    Granite is OK for speech to text (ASR)
  - root-parent 4mo ago
    Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology. 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....
  - tekchip 4mo ago
senordevnyc 4mo ago
I downvoted you for your complaining about downvotes fwiw. 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.
marcus_cemes 4mo ago
To be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo. 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.
- dr_dshiv 4mo ago
  Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency… Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.
  - marcus_cemes 4mo ago
    I'm inclined to agree with you, but you could make the same argument for exploiting natural resources and the environment. I don't think it's being done right at the moment, and it does not seem to be benefiting people as much as certain companies.
  - muvlon 4mo ago
    Well, is this mad dash for AI producing "outcomes that are beneficial for society at large" yet? So far it looks like its mostly producing a ton of negative externalities and wealth transfer to corrupt elites. Also, no, abandoning ethics is not an option, what a ridiculous suggestion.
    - dr_dshiv 4mo ago
ricardobayes 4mo ago
Well Europe is famously a laggard when it comes to new tech - in parts of Switzerland, two horses were required be mounted in front to carry cars up until 1925. UK required a person to walk in front of a car and wave a red flag.
applicative 4mo ago
> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI They will forever have superior weights?
- JKCalhoun 4mo ago
  I would imagine it will be a fundamental breakthrough, not weights alone, that are going to usher in the next generation of AI. Perhaps China will in fact make that breakthrough. They certainly seem to have a lot of eyeballs in the field right now.
  - rapind 4mo ago
    I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).
  - applicative 4mo ago
    There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu. There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
JKCalhoun 4mo ago
"…Anthropic Marketeer strike force…" Might also just be the result of "good will" (that the company has deftly fostered). Other companies might learn from Anthropic in that regard.
- JSR_FDED 4mo ago
  “Good will” is easier if OpenAI is your yardstick
  - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
    As evil as Google is as a company these days [cough disclaimer, used to work here, so biased] I can't help but think that if Gemini didn't... suck, and if they had a coding model at the same quality as GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 they'd be completely cleaning up purely on the basis of relative reputations of the companies. 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.
cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
I also get the downvotes for the GPT thing, and agree with you about 5.5's quality, but TBH I don't think it's Anthropic marketing as just two other things: 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.
wunderlotus 4mo ago
> - If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired? Yes, if the premise was true but it’s not. https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/bbf5a4e9-204 https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/bbf5a4e9-204
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
  Interesting...but this shows how dumb these AI are. And they misunderstood nothing to show for as...literally nothing to show for. Yes not factually but he has nothing effectively not much that is competitive to show for so its literally true. And had they been give this clarification then would have suddenly said: "Oh yes of course, you are absolutely right, you are correct on challenging me on that...."

kristopolous 4mo ago

They did muse spark ... it's not garbage. 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...

jansan 4mo ago
Mo Bitar said something like "Meta's LLM is the one you use if you accidentially hit the wrong button in WhatsApp. Its user base is fat-finger phone users."
- kristopolous 4mo ago
  Understood - they're just doing other things. Maybe custom ad rewriting for a target audience or some kind of deep analytics insight into user behavior or translations that optimizes for maximizing purchasing habits over literary accuracy ... I'm just saying their incentives are elsewhere and maybe Muse is serving them well. I mean that is the smart move here. Focus the model on optimizing the core business. For Meta, that's not coding tools.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
  As comparison the WHOLE NASA budget is 24 billion. Meta burned 10x that on AI...

Certhas 4mo ago

None of these models come from universities, European or otherwise. 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.

kristopolous 4mo ago
I'm actually more curious about IBM. Their granite series appears to be nowhere close to competitive. 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?
- greenavocado 4mo ago
  Granite is OK for speech to text (ASR)
- root-parent 4mo ago
  Agree that IBM has no excuse. Specially for how long they have been trying to do AI. Although Watson was a completely different technology. 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....
- tekchip 4mo ago

senordevnyc 4mo ago

I downvoted you for your complaining about downvotes fwiw. 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.

marcus_cemes 4mo ago

To be honest, living in Switzerland and speaking with peers, we're just exhausted by the constant AI hype. For a lot of us, the fact that Europe isn't frantically trying to scrape the entire internet and every book in existence for the next massive model isn't a bad thing. The big players are doing their thing, like with the nuclear arms race. We regulate a lot, too much a lot of the time, but sometimes that trickles down to other places too. A lot was done right, imo. 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.

dr_dshiv 4mo ago
Sir, I would suggest that if Europe fails to be economically competitive, the downstream implications on European society will produce much worse outcomes than (for instance) data transparency… Doing things with ethical intentions does not necessarily produce outcomes that are beneficial for society at large.
- marcus_cemes 4mo ago
  I'm inclined to agree with you, but you could make the same argument for exploiting natural resources and the environment. I don't think it's being done right at the moment, and it does not seem to be benefiting people as much as certain companies.
- muvlon 4mo ago
  Well, is this mad dash for AI producing "outcomes that are beneficial for society at large" yet? So far it looks like its mostly producing a ton of negative externalities and wealth transfer to corrupt elites. Also, no, abandoning ethics is not an option, what a ridiculous suggestion.
  - dr_dshiv 4mo ago

ricardobayes 4mo ago

Well Europe is famously a laggard when it comes to new tech - in parts of Switzerland, two horses were required be mounted in front to carry cars up until 1925. UK required a person to walk in front of a car and wave a red flag.

applicative 4mo ago

> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI They will forever have superior weights?

JKCalhoun 4mo ago
I would imagine it will be a fundamental breakthrough, not weights alone, that are going to usher in the next generation of AI. Perhaps China will in fact make that breakthrough. They certainly seem to have a lot of eyeballs in the field right now.
- rapind 4mo ago
  I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).
- applicative 4mo ago
  There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu. There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]

JKCalhoun 4mo ago

"…Anthropic Marketeer strike force…" Might also just be the result of "good will" (that the company has deftly fostered). Other companies might learn from Anthropic in that regard.

JSR_FDED 4mo ago
“Good will” is easier if OpenAI is your yardstick
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  As evil as Google is as a company these days [cough disclaimer, used to work here, so biased] I can't help but think that if Gemini didn't... suck, and if they had a coding model at the same quality as GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 they'd be completely cleaning up purely on the basis of relative reputations of the companies. 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.

cmrdporcupine 4mo ago

I also get the downvotes for the GPT thing, and agree with you about 5.5's quality, but TBH I don't think it's Anthropic marketing as just two other things: 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.

wunderlotus 4mo ago

> - If Zuckerberg could be fired, after spending a total of $235 billion on AI and having NOTHING to show for...should he be fired? Yes, if the premise was true but it’s not. https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/bbf5a4e9-204 https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/questions/bbf5a4e9-204

tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
Interesting...but this shows how dumb these AI are. And they misunderstood nothing to show for as...literally nothing to show for. Yes not factually but he has nothing effectively not much that is competitive to show for so its literally true. And had they been give this clarification then would have suddenly said: "Oh yes of course, you are absolutely right, you are correct on challenging me on that...."