German search engine Ecosia is replacing Mistral with open-weight AI models, including Chinese-developed Qwen, GLM and Kimi, through a partnership with German AI platform Melious. Founder and CEO Christian Kroll said the switch had roughly halved costs while improving quality and performance.

all 5 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] 10 points 19 hours ago (1 child)

Will be interesting to ask it a couple questions about Taiwan or Tiananmen square... In principle, the censorship can be edited out of open-weight models, but I'm not sure whether Melious does that.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • Well, don't know if they do, but that's the general advantage of open weight. You control infrastructure, you know exactly what happens to your data, prompts, context windows. If you so wish, you can finetune the model, even just LoRA so the cost is pretty low too. Totally feasible for local companies that own a few A100s/H200s/MI350s.

    Mistral, anthropic, openai: no chance, pay up buttercup, and if your data is interesting to us we'll steal it and publish your work as our own

    Closed models are a huge risk to use for anything of value

  • source
  • parent
  • [โ€“] 9 points 20 hours ago

    So Qwen is trained on Chinese propaganda. What is GLM and what is Kimi?

  • source
  • [โ€“] 4 points 16 hours ago*

    This is sad news,but I've used Mistral until fairly recently, until they changed the way tokens are being counted or some change around providing "more transparency", resulting in barely getting any usage out of my 18โ‚ฌ pro subscription.

    Yeah, I tried to support more of EU economy,but I was throwing my money out the windows, compared to their competitors and their models and offers.

    I wish they could see they are not competitive at all.

    Edit: I don't think going full Chinese LLM is the answer.

  • source
  • improving quality and performance.

    By which measures? Spreading Chinese propaganda can never improve quality nor performance.

  • source