Comment by pzo
17 hours ago
> The real loser in all this is obviously Europe, which has nothing competitive once the Chinese models are gone.
Those models are open source / open weights. Europeans can continue with Chinese models as a base same like Cursor used Kimi K2.5 a base for their composer 2.0 model or SWE-2 from cognition is post-trained Kimi K3
Similar to how some labs have done free stealth model releases. Trillions of coding tokens ought to improve performance of the downstream model. However, improving the base model architecture remains the bottleneck since you will not reach RSI with just that (assuming you ever can). And compute, lots of compute…
That strategy only works for model generations that are released with open weights. If Kimi K4 is proprietary, then China has the newer weights and the EU does not.
It's also worth noting that more post-training does not change the model architecture. No amount of post-training on deepseek v4-flash will ever make it as efficient as deepseek v4.1-flash because 4.1-flash uses a fundamentally different architecture. Being stuck on an older base model means you don't keep up with these architectural improvements that unlock significant gains in speed / efficiency.