agree. I have a usecase for a bigger open-weight model hosted by an EU company and the selection isnt really great, hard to make the regulatory gods (and the devs) happy at the same time right now
Never understood why hetzner gets brought up so positively here when there are dozens of EU competitors who are just as good and don't run 7 year old discounted servers
Good to see more developments in this space. I quite like this service, which is a little further than Hetzner and has several models to choose from: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/ai-services
Important note on Infomaniak's offering - when they first launched it, I gave it a try but despite claims that it's OpenAI API compatible, even basic things like sending a base64 encoded image were broken. I reached out to their support, who replied with (verbatim): "Unfortunately, we do not provide support for our AI Service, as the solution is highly unmanaged and uses our API."
"highly unmanaged" didn't fill me with confidence, and "uses our API" is a very weird reason to give for not offering support. I wrote off ever using them for anything beyond email after that reply.
I highly agree. I once registered a domain through them that happened to be my last name but coincidentally also the name of a company. They restricted me from using the domain and never refunded me the yearly fee for it (citing trademark reasons, although under Swiss trademark law, someones legal name is not a trademark violation, especially as it was just my personal website and I wasn't working on a competing product/service). Only weeks later someone else successfully registered it without such issues.
Worse even, in my account panel I still had control over the e-mail service of the domain, so there was most definitely a pretty bad security critical bug there.
Depends on your mindset. If you are an Engineer that does not need hand-holding and you accept terse answers from support with the gratitude to the human on the other side, then go for it.
You will at least not need months of training and tough exams to be an expert in Hetzner Cloud. It is simple, but that's the point.
I mostly use Hetzner baremetal servers and not cloud, but the support there is in my experience very competent, but also VERY german and direct. I can imagine if youre neither german or super technical that this can be intimidating or considered unfriendly
Whats definitely missing: a solid (non Mistral) GDPR compliant coding plan / subscription. All offerings are either US or China based. With the newest open weights models this became really interesting imo.
This seems like a smart move, given their ability to host efficiently. I approve of efforts to make the cost of inference for smaller useful models slowly approach 'close to zero' and there are many good paths for getting there. It is useful for companies to get fast hosting for the class of smaller models they may end up hosting in house.
> The enable_thinking option is worth mentioning. Without it, the model can spend a surprising amount of the completion budget reasoning before it returns a visible answer.
Straight up the opposite, which the name makes abundantly clear, with the option it does reasoning, without it it doesn't...
llamacpp has a reasoning-budget and reasoning-message setting that can both be a global or per header setting. Using it, you can stop it's reasoning token count and insert a message at the point you stopped it.
This allows both the client and server to customize it. I typically use a message that tells it to compact the conversation and use subagents. I find the reasoning gets bloated when it's failed to do whatever task it's doing and often times it either has too little context (subagents) or its context is bloated (compact).
This works fairly well to get it to extend workable life up to ~1M on a local model.
Interesting. I could see them perhaps coming in competitive for models that fit into single cards? Less so playing in the big model serving league...climbing into that esp right now would be madness
There is no "West" anymore, at least not in the sense it was used in the last 50–70 years. There is now Europe/Canada/Australia on the one side, and the USA as an adversary on the other, and that won't change in the foreseeable time.
What we need is frontier open weight models in the EU, Canada, and Australia.
You're not necessarily wrong for now, but that framing might be too narrow.
It is not beyond imagination that a government can limit availability to future frontier versions of the open weight models produced within their jurisdiction.
It pays to be a little paranoid and have a diversified portfolio of options to choose from. Anything that can have major geopolitical consequence is especially susceptible to such structural risk.
This has nothing to do with any particular government/country/jurisdiction except insofar as said country is a leading power and hence has immense leverage across a very wide range of dimensions. Said more plainly, it is safe to assume that a country with immense power is unlikely to be willing to cede or distribute such power to others.
If you're hung up on my choice of "the West", consider that I mean it geopolitically and economically, so broadly includes North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. I could have also said the Global South, but I think it is a fair statement that any of those countries have the means, but I'd be totally cool with that too!
I read that data centers in Frankfurt use 40% of city energy, and seems that some fossil fuel based workarounds are being pushed. I hope we do better than the US in the energy and data center gold rush.
what is the hallucination here? it is fast, free and fun to try. And I genuinely think that the hardware decision (if they get bigger gpus) decides if this will be a banger product or not?
It works great.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/generative-apis/
https://www.scaleway.com/en/inference/
"highly unmanaged" didn't fill me with confidence, and "uses our API" is a very weird reason to give for not offering support. I wrote off ever using them for anything beyond email after that reply.
Worse even, in my account panel I still had control over the e-mail service of the domain, so there was most definitely a pretty bad security critical bug there.
You will at least not need months of training and tough exams to be an expert in Hetzner Cloud. It is simple, but that's the point.
Straight up the opposite, which the name makes abundantly clear, with the option it does reasoning, without it it doesn't...
This allows both the client and server to customize it. I typically use a message that tells it to compact the conversation and use subagents. I find the reasoning gets bloated when it's failed to do whatever task it's doing and often times it either has too little context (subagents) or its context is bloated (compact).
This works fairly well to get it to extend workable life up to ~1M on a local model.
Will this be the new division of labor?
Americans - best proprietary models
Chinese - best open weight models
Europeans - best / most efficient inference service
Maybe Nvidia's Nemotron can get there.
https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/Nemotron-3-Ultra/
What we need is frontier open weight models in the EU, Canada, and Australia.
a) broad competition is good
b) jurisdiction diversification (you don't want to be dependent on the regulatory winds of a single jurisdiction)
If I'm running a Kimi model on my local cluster, the CCP can't shut it off.
It's not like the Finnish government has veto power over Linux.
It is not beyond imagination that a government can limit availability to future frontier versions of the open weight models produced within their jurisdiction.
It pays to be a little paranoid and have a diversified portfolio of options to choose from. Anything that can have major geopolitical consequence is especially susceptible to such structural risk.
This has nothing to do with any particular government/country/jurisdiction except insofar as said country is a leading power and hence has immense leverage across a very wide range of dimensions. Said more plainly, it is safe to assume that a country with immense power is unlikely to be willing to cede or distribute such power to others.
If you're hung up on my choice of "the West", consider that I mean it geopolitically and economically, so broadly includes North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. I could have also said the Global South, but I think it is a fair statement that any of those countries have the means, but I'd be totally cool with that too!
> For now, the API is fast, free, and fun to try. The next hardware announcement will tell us much more than another small model would.