Comment by SyneRyder
12 hours ago
The Chinese models are open weights, so they can host & finetune them in the EU. Mistral is calling them "European Compute Units". Mistral has pivoted to become a hosting provider of open weight LLMs.
"Mistral’s platform will support third-party open models, starting with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2. This and future open models will run on the same infrastructure, regional controls, and service commitments as Mistral models, so customers can broaden model choice without fragmenting where their AI runs."
"European Compute Units, or ECUs, convert those commitments into access to Mistral-built infrastructure over multiple years."
https://mistral.ai/news/regional-inference-open-models-new-c...
Giving open weight models more leeway “feels” right, but it’s a massive self-pwn based on the mother of all back doors.
It’s a little bit like saying “sysadmins need work visas and vetting, but this guy works for free, so just give him root and don’t think too hard about it”.
For Europe the choices are, foreign actor A or foreign actor B.
I don't think the current US administration has shown themselves to be less hostile than China...
I'm not saying the scrutiny on US models is unwarranted. I'm saying that open-weight models are the perfect trojan horse, so giving those models a pass on that same level of scrutiny (irrespective of provenance) is just begging to be pwned.
This makes much more sense, if they're a hosting provider.