Comment by tannhaeuser
5 days ago
I mean, Mistral AI is a Paris-based company, and theirs was considered on par or better than other open weight models such as llama3.1 and qwen2.5, and mistral-24b is currently beating oh-so-great gemma3-27b depending on tasks.
Also, Stable Diffusion was originally (and still is I believe) developed in Munich.
It's true though that raising capital and finding investors works wayyy better in the US (kindof needless to say on HN) and so was getting top talent - at least in the past. Don't get me started on energy prices ;) but I don't believe those contribute significantly in the end anyway.
You don't think American companies raising hundreds of millions to ten billion for training models contributed to their model performance or market positions?
I think a pile of money and talent is largely the cause of where they're at.