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Quasar 438B: Europe's Leading AI Model
- zkmon 24d agoIt's amazing to see Qwen3.8-27B occupying a respectable central place among the giants.
- throwaw12 24d agoDidn't know the "Highest scoring EU model" has a low bar, lower than Qwen3.8-27B, but still congratulations on the milestone, hopefully next iterations will get better from here
- Schlagbohrer 24d agoIt is surprising given how many parameters it has that it scores so low. But, hopefully this will build up domestic talent and understanding and let Europe compete on the world stage with this.
- nicman23 24d agoi mean qwen3.8 is a technical marvel
- walrus01 24d ago3.8-flash-next quantized in a "large" Q4 that just fits in 128GB RAM even more so, in how close it can get to state of the art in a number of benchmarks. Or a large Q8 version of it that fits in under 190GB. Competing against things that are closed weights/opaque information about the model and might very well be 600B+ in size.
- nicman23 24d agoit "fits" in 64 ram with mmap. granted it runs at 15 tk/s with a 9070xt but it runs
- walrus01 24d agoRight, I meant "fits" in the sense of I can load the whole thing into some combination of system RAM and GPU at llama-server launch. 15 tk/s isn't useless if you can give it big tasks to do overnight, or like ask it to do something and check back 3-4 hours later.
- nicman23 23d agoyeah specially if you have it do some long task that also has to wait for ie compilation anyways
- trvz 24d agoAs a European: I don’t care where an open weight model comes from.
- RamblingCTO 24d agoAs a European: I do, because I'm not oblivious to geopolitics or digital sovereignty.
- espadrine 24d agoAs a European, I do. I don’t envy the state that has to buy all its water and food from its aggressive, militarized neighbour.
- walrus01 24d ago> the state that has to buy all its water and food from its aggressive, militarized neighbour. As a complete tangent, now imagine being a Canadian and realizing how much of your fresh fruits and vegetables come from the USA (or if from Mexico, through the USA).
- Marciplan 24d agoAs a European: I do.
- jooops1 24d agoI do care, because those models can contain backdoors and 'open weight' models can require specialized hardware to run in the future.
- antman 24d agoExcept if it stops coming from anywhere.
- vrganj 24d agoThat's a very limiting view of things. A model, even an open weight one, is never neutral, it is an encoding of a way of viewing the world. What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding. Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctrinated. I don't want my model to reflect the views of American oligarchs or Chinese cadres. I want European values of enlightenment and humanitarianism to be the default.
- adev_ 24d agoAny hope of an integration to Openrouter ?
- amelius 24d agoWhat I want is a model that is trained with data that is openly available, where the data is curated by academia. I don't want corporate crap in my AI (unless it has been filtered properly).
- thevinter 24d agoI'm ready to stand corrected, but I'm pretty positive that such a process would require 1) an insane amount of work and 2) wouldn't produce anything close to SOTA results because of the lack of training data. It is my understanding that - sadly - the insane amount of copyrighted works and corporate crap is a prerequisite for having a corpus that is big enough
- Schlagbohrer 24d agoI think these days even the frontier labs are using large amounts of synthetic data too, which must be worth it even though it seems like an Ouroborous.
- dorkypunk 24d agoThere are models that do that, for example the Olmo family of models, although they have Gemma 3 performance levels for that matter.
- walrus01 24d agoI 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?
- em500 24d agoI 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 24d agoChinese 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 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.
- Schlagbohrer 24d agoI am still very surprised how absent India is from the LLM game.
- walrus01 24d agoIndividual Indians are very much present in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. I have a theory that the top 5% talent of Indian nationals who are legitimately qualified and skilled, for very logical reasons would much rather take a six-figure USD equivalent salary in EUR or USD and enjoy the lifestyle benefits that come with it rather than bootstrap an Indian domestic AI lab.
- torginus 24d agoIt's not like people in other places couldn't solve this problem. Yes, the US pays more, but a lot of people would still prefer staying home, and it's not like they wouldn't be paid very well compared to the local salary. And besides, a lot of Indians in India are working for FAANG, and don't earn US money - I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company.
- walrus01 23d ago> I'm not sure why it wouldn't make sense for some of these talented engineers to work for an indigenous tech company. India doesn't have the same structure, existence and prevalence of VCs with large pools of available seed round and series A money that are necessary for a start-up to acquire enough funds to realistically train a model. Particularly with the hardware/datacenter costs involved in that. There's a reason why a huge number of motivated and talented Indian people form companies outside of India.
- torginus 23d agoI don't really have an special insight on India, but some of the biggest tech CEOs are Indian born and raised (Google, MS...) Surely they have the resources, connections and experience in how to build tech companies. In fact I'd be surprised if they were not involved in some capacity. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but considering they have the people, money, and connections, I would expect a lot more success stories.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- try-working 24d agoThe leadership team of that company is outsized and bizarre.
- espadrine 24d agoI wish for this company to have great models. I am glad to see such good scores. I see they have a HuggingFace account[0] and they fine-tuned GPT-OSS, Nemotron, and Qwen, in the past under new names. There are some things about it that make me worry though. • They don't indicate the active parameter count, or indicate whether they pretrained the model. It could be a MiniMax M3 finetuning, as the parameter count almost matches (435B vs. 438B). • They mention using quantum algorithms in other projects: https://multiversecomputing.com/singularity https://multiversecomputing.com/singularity despite quantum algorithms not being typically useful currently. It would not be the first company with a splashy release, like Brampton Intelligence[1], or SubQ[2]. Unlike those, they do seem to have experience fine-tuning models. Regardless of my worries, I am rooting for them to learn how to train models. [0]: https://huggingface.co/MultiverseComputingCAI https://huggingface.co/MultiverseComputingCAI [1]: https://x.com/newsystems_/status/1904577550690771050 https://x.com/newsystems_/status/1904577550690771050 [2]: https://subq.ai/introducing-subq https://subq.ai/introducing-subq
- singularity2001 24d ago"quantum algorithms" that would put them directly on a blacklist if I had one. They might as well directly promote their stuff with Cold Fusion and Snake Oil.
- amazingamazing 24d agoHow can it be that a 438B model is worse than Qwen3.8-27B? Are these benchmarks totally gamed?
- magicalhippo 24d agoTraining data plays a huge role. As an example, Qwen 3 was generally considered a significant improvement over Qwen 2.5, but the architecture only had minor tweaks. The major change was the quantity and quality of training data they used for Qwen 3.
- ThouYS 24d agoqwen is a magical model. it has the mandate of heaven. was so already at 3.6-27B
- Caius-Cosades 24d ago[dead]
- embedding-shape 24d ago> Quasar is not only intelligent, it is also fast. It returns 500 tokens, thinking time included, in 15.3 seconds. Seems to be worded a bit strange, is "thinking time" referring to prompt processing or something? Otherwise "reasoning/thinking" is typically part of the returned tokens, at least for most non-OpenAI/non-Anthropic platforms, so you can see the actual reasoning. But here it seems either they word this weirdly, or "thinking" is somehow separate from the actual chat completion request?
- Roark66 24d agoAre the weights public? I'm not seeing them
- docheinestages 24d agoIs this a compressed and retrained version of GLM-5.2?
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- jtrn 24d agoAs a European, or in general, this make me happy. Since the more diversity the better. Tho it’s hard not to not to think of this as a big fish in a small pond situation (when talking about best model in EU).
- Roark66 24d agoWhen the weights are closed I don't believe any benchmark. I just got Qwen3.8-27B to score extra 10% on SWE Pro by adding a proxy in front of it that has few simple "harness like features": - when the model gets stuck it tells it to "go on" - when it sends no output, malformed json, slips to wrong tool use format, etc it asks it to "try again better" - detects repetition and tells the model. - injects a prompt about "planning tool use" when it seems to be using same tools repeatedly. - injects a reminder it can use tools if there are no tool uses for over X messages. 10% - with just that. I have more to test. My point is, open weights models get tested on naked model quality. "Frontier" models get tested as a model + whatever secret sauce they choose to put in front.
- pu_pe 24d agoThe company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me. From their about page: > At the heart of Multiverse's platform is CompactifAI, a compression technology that applies tensor networks, a mathematical framework from quantum physics, to the problem of AI model compression. This application was pioneered by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Román Orús and reduces the size of large language models by up to 80-95% with immaterial accuracy loss. Ironic, considering they are releasing a 438B model that loses to a 27B one. From another part: > Singularity Machine Learning is a cloud service that uses quantum machine learning for solving supervised learning problems. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys just finetuned an open Chinese model and called it a day.
- jgbuddy 24d agoThat made me laugh out loud
- comandillos 24d agoThey had other models a while ago, named 'Pulsar', and they were finetunes of Nemotron in collaboration with NVIDIA. I think this will be something similar.
- walrus01 24d ago> I wouldn't be surprised if these guys just finetuned an open Chinese model and called it a day. Easy enough to find out, ask it a whole bunch of questions about politically sensitive things that would be impossible to publish on CCTV, the Peoples Daily, CGTN, etc. If they didn't train the model and just fine tuned it, a lot of "don't talk about Tibet or the Dalai Lama or what happened in 1989" will be perma baked into it.
- fantyoon 24d agoI might be misreading this. But they seem to heavily imply that they trained this model. Or at least want to give off the impression that that is the case. Otherwise the "Europe's Leading Model" line doesn't make much sense. Their bread and butter is to remove parameters from models [1] and I think this is GLM 5.2 with parameters removed. Its advertised in their changelog [2] as "capabilities are identical to GLM 5.2," it has the same two effort settings "high" and "max," and both are text only [3]. I might be wrong about this, but I would love to hear more about what they did before changing my mind. Not the greatest fan of the marketing personally. Irrespective of what this model is. [1]: https://multiversecomputing.com/compactifai/deployment https://multiversecomputing.com/compactifai/deployment [2]: https://docs.compactif.ai/changelog/#added-3 https://docs.compactif.ai/changelog/#added-3 [3]: https://docs.compactif.ai/features/multi-modality/#compatibility https://docs.compactif.ai/features/multi-modality/#compatibi...
- spindump8930 23d agoOn Artificial Analysis it's listed as "Quasar 438B (max, based on GLM-5.2)" - so you see exactly right. Not sure if this was changed post publicity drive or not, this is the first I'm seeing about this model. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/quasar-438b https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/quasar-438b
- fantyoon 23d agoI don't remember that being there, but you know how memory can be. I checked the Wayback Machine and it has a snapshot of the page that does not mention it. The snapshot is from September 1st, not from yesterday, so perhaps they changed it before this announcement and my comment was made. But I personally don't think so. https://web.archive.org/web/20260901084009/https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/quasar-438b https://web.archive.org/web/20260901084009/https://artificia...
- V1ndaar 24d agoMultiverse Computing is one of the weirdest companies I've encountered here in Europe/Spain. Their product / job application descriptions are just technobabble. Despite my doubts I applied to one of their positions a couple of years back only to receive a super late and generic "we are not moving forward" mail (I'd say I fit pretty damn well for the position, but it seems to be the new normal that most companies don't even want to chat with people 99% of the time).
- hmokiguess 24d ago> Unlocking the Quantum AI Software Revolution I'm sorry, what?
- inigyou 24d agoIt's a scam company
- hathym 24d ago[dead]
- scotty79 24d agoSo, slower and worse than Gemini 3.7 (high)? I don't get what the issue is. Chinese labs fully publish how they make great models. Architecture is known, training methods are often very open. Why Europe just can't copy what they do?
- tevon 24d agoThis has to be fake... or similar. Their CMO's bio lists "20,000 'qualified' quantum AI contacts on linkedin" as the SECOND line in his bio. "Business Management by ESADE. Co-Founder and CMO of Multiverse Computing. President, “barcelonaqbit-bqb”, 20,000 “qualified” quantum AI contacts on LinkedIn. VP of the AMETIC Innovation..."
- torginus 24d agoIsn't this standard in Europe? There exists a layer of well-connected and impenetrable managerial class, shielded by a glass ceiling. The entire company is BS, and they use some folks with clout and credentials to access grants and handouts (or whatever inscrutable financial reasons). They often sell products to each others' companies or big Euro vendors. Even if this fits the spirit of corruption, I'm not sure it fits the spirit of it. They certainly aren't there to build a product or provide valuable expertise, but taxes and salaries are paid, people go to conferences, they might even build something, but its a giant LARP. Don't expect to get rewarded or recognized for solid engineering. I'm sure if you worked for a mid-sized Euro firm, you know what I'm talking about.
- DeathArrow 24d agoSo "Europe's Leading AI Model" is just a modified Chinese model which does worse than the better Chinese models? It seems Europe is many years behind in tech. Maybe for AI models they are just a decade behind, but as far as producing hardware capable to run SOA models they lag tens of years.
- vrganj 24d agoWhat about producing hardware capable of producing hardware capable of SOA models?
- konradha 24d agoIt is beyond me how they managed to acquire such funding. Sounds a lot like an earlier quantum computing effort which pivoted to "AI" as well: https://zapataquantum.com https://zapataquantum.com
- Bluestein 24d ago"Owner: MULTIVERSE COMPUTING, S.L., a company with registered offices in Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa), Paseo Miramón, nº 170, 3º-03, registered in the Companies Register of Gipuzkoa in volume 2.894, folio 202, page SS-41.659 and with tax identification number B-75218040 ..."
- rayiner 23d agoWhat will Europe do when American and Chinese AIs and robots render half of the European population obsolete? How do they come back from missing the boat on such a transformational technology? Europeans seem resigned to a future of being American and Chinese economic colonies.
- tcp_handshaker 23d agoEuropeans will raise a wall, to keep away all Americans, uninsured, and unemployed by the US Oligarchs automation. You voted for it...two times...
- kingleopold 23d agogo to mirror and ask, why waymo did not even eliminate all or most taxi drivers in Usa? answer is there. Tech is real but it take decades.
- verzali 23d agoEnjoy life? Seems like the Americans are going to be the ones getting the raw deal with the extreme inequality they are stumbling into.
- rayiner 23d agoIt will be more like India under the East India Company. European economies will pay a tax to America or China for AI and robotics technology unavailable at home. Remember, the British didn’t “loot” India in the sense of walking out the door with rupees. They halted India’s economic progress by preventing access to revolutionary industrial technology without going through British companies. Indians grew cotton, but if they wanted manufactured textiles they had to export to cotton to Britain and by back the finished goods from British companies. Europeans will find themselves in the same place with AI and robotics. And yeah, India had very low income inequality back then. It still does! It has a Gini coefficient of 25.5, making it the fourth most equal country in the world.
- vrganj 22d agoSell them the machines they need to make the machines to run their AI?
- tacomagick 23d agoWho named this