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Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model

675 points · 327 comments · bastitx

  1. petesergeant · · focus · HN ↗
    I wish nothing but luck for an EU model, but:

    > intellectual-property safety

    My suspicion is that you simply can't build an even slightly competitive model without liberally stealing your training data, in 2026, as much as I'd like it to be otherwise. You can get to the point that I suspect most of the frontier labs are at, where you've laundered the initially stolen data through the creation of huge amounts of derivative synthetic data, but still. Anyone who isn't comfortable stealing their training data is bringing a knife to a gun fight, and is going to die a noble but inevitable death.

    1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
      Have you tried the model itself and seen if it's "even slightly competitive" or not, and have specific complaints about it? Otherwise it feels like you're complaining about something that is easy to test but rather than taking the time to actually figuring that out first, you're arguing about some general and theoretical thing which the submission (may) directly disprove.
      1. petesergeant · · focus · HN ↗
        No, I haven’t, but I’ll donate $20 to the non-political charity of your choice if it doesn’t turn out to sit a significant difference from the frontier.

        I think it’s a safe assumption that they’re leaning into “sovereign” because performance is bad.

        1. ygjb · · focus · HN ↗
          I think you have it backwards. Sovereign is the goal, good can come later.

          There is a proliferation of sovereign models under development specifically to address data sovereignty, and a loss of performance is absolutely acceptable over the risk that a once ally will turn adversarial, or a foreign business stops serving what has become critical infrastructure.

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