alt Hacker NewsBigger and still worse than existing free Chinese models that are smaller? Open weight models are nice, but at this point it seems western models are very far behind Chinese ones, despite Chinese companies publishing a lot of their findings. I hope we get more open models and more providers, as being stuck with a model from China or US with no competition is risky.
Google does do a great job with Gemma models. It's one of the few language models actually good at language. OpenAI's top closed models can't even write norwegian correctly.
It takes time / few iterations to get it right (and it's moving target), but yes, expensive trial, my personal feeling is that they went a bit too high, at the same time who knows, maybe good move – as they're saying RL didn't plateau. It feels like they had something like $100M budget for it?