Comment by befelix
6 hours ago
Disclaimer: I am part of the team that trained Kolibri, opinions are mine.
Qwen models have solid performance on benchmarks and we're transparent about this in the report. We're just happy to share a European alternative in the small model space, where I don't think we can afford to be fully dependent on China. We also put a lot of effort into German language quality things that don't show up in evals at all (style, Grammar, German reasoning, etc).
Sovereignty is imho mostly about choice and control over your data. Cohere is no different on that front and personally I'm quite excited about what we will build together post-merger.
Souvereignty is about ownership and about knowing the training data. That is especially important given a business model aiming at the government as a key customer. With Schwarz, Cohere, SAP, NVIDIA and the like as backers society can’t have souvereignty in any meaningful way. Of course it would be a plus to keep US agencies out of the data streams. But this technology will be used to support and make decisions that impact citizens. That being said, incredible achievement.