Overlooked French AI Veteran LightOn Hits 70M Open-Source Model Downloads

Overlooked in a roundup of European LLM players, French firm LightOn builds models from scratch based on DeepSeek's architecture, with its ModernBERT surpassing 70 million downloads, says co-founder Igor Carron.

2026-10-05 ~ 2026-10-05 · 2 related posts

• France's overlooked LightOn: 70M+ open-source downloads, before Mistral — IgorCarron · 2026-10-05
• LightOn defends its Europe-built models: DeepSeek-cited architecture, 70M ModernBERT downloads — IgorCarron · 2026-10-05