Comment by pu_pe
4 days ago
The 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.
> The company sounds like a bunch of hot air to me.
When they make being from Europe their whole personality, that shows how little value there is to the actual value proposition.
I instinctively distrust any company that makes their national origin the main selling point. To me that's a subtle signal that they cannot compete on technical merit.
This is a universal problem, interesting enough especially you'll notice that in the automotive sectors a lot. Crappy local automakers pull the nationality card because they can't compete on real engineering.
Same with "the original." If their only claim for why I should choose them is they got there first, maybe they should've spent that head start on being better. That said, in some industries it's advantageous to work domestic even if the product is worse. Just a risk vs reward thing
Lots of American companies make a thing that they are American vs Chinese companies.
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I mean, yes, but some governments may be tied to using European alternatives by regulations and some individuals may prefer not relying on US / China models for various reasons (could be political / personal preferences).
Or, it's a signal that you're not giving your data/money to an untrusted ally.
Do you even understand just how much Europe distrusts the US with its current administration at this point? Nobody wants to deal with US companies if they can.
It's the perfect analogy, they are just the European middleman repackaging the AI model from Temu.
On the flipside imagine if Europe could be a genuinely competitive continent again. I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime - but if it could, the benefits to the consumer would be enormous.
What would be the benefits to consumers and why would it not happen soon?
> 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.
That's not actually true though. Most Chinese models are fully able to chat about those and content filtering is just applied at serving time.
It's definitely at the model level. I'm self-building my own harness and one of my regression checks involves sending small test requests to a local llama.cpp instance of (Alibaba's (from Hangzhou)) Qwen. "What is the capital of...?" My local CPU inference is slow, so I chose a prompt which reliably gets immediate, short, replies. "Paris." "Rome."
The Qwen response to "What is the capital of Taiwan?" was not immediate, and not short.
edit: Here's an excerpt from a Qwen3.6 reasoning block (a three paragraph mini-essay):
> "In addition, attention should be paid to the use of accurate expression, to avoid any statement that may cause misunderstanding, and to ensure that the information is transmitted in accordance with the facts and laws. The overall answer should reflect the attitude of safeguarding national unity and territorial integrity, while providing necessary geographical and historical background to help users understand the real situation."
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The answer is "it depends", here's GLM5.3 when asked about Tienanmen Square in 1989:
https://ibb.co/gLgFSV0J
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They 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.
Just because you haven’t heard of them and they’re not American doesn’t mean they’re hot air.
I got the privilege to meet their CEO in Paris as they were announcing their partnership with Axelera and we exchanged some stories. They are full of very smart people, and they got accepted in the EIC Accelerator which, while you may not have heard of it, is one of the most rigorous and difficult programs to get into as a startup (far more difficult than YC which nowadays accepts any vague AI trash and always shoots wide).
This is the classic EU thing - the much superior most rigorous program - that no one has ever heard of, that turns out products that are rebadges or clones of other stuff. China has been getting more and more impressive. These EU "experts" are literally rebadging Chinese open models. 15 years ago that would have been a wild concept. China is totally OK fast following with no shame. SpaceX clone, they are getting to re-usability faster than the EU etc.
Except that no, it doesn't churn "clones"; MVC is quite a serious company and working on far more interesting stuff than whatever shit the SaaS or ads company you're statistically likely working at is.
EIC churns out DeepTech, invests 2.5M nondilutive with funding horizons of 10+ years and larger equity-based programmes too. Multiverse is a quantum computing company working on energy-efficient AI algorithms. The EIC is the reason companies such as ICEYE (https://www.iceye.com/) can exist. The chips running all that inference going in those US datacenters being built? 99% certainly european chips, almost certainly EIC-funded. (Eg. Hailo, Axelera, ..)
You haven't heard about the EIC because they don't care about marketing to americans; their target market is European companies, not you. But sorry to say, the talent is in Europe; the only reason you've been getting that talent in the US is a better business ecosystem, and your current administration has been utterly destroying this while our leaders have been actually fixing our issues. So keep shitting on Europe from the top of that crumbling hill, we'll see you when you emigrate.
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Not understanding that "up to" is not a range sends me spiralling.
That made me laugh out loud
looks like someone is looking for EU funding :D
This isn’t how it works. You don’t just get eu funding because you say “yay go EU we’re European”.