France's overlooked LightOn: 70M+ open-source downloads, before Mistral
IgorCarron · x · 2026-10-05
Responding to a roundup of Europe's LLM players (Mistral, Aleph Alpha, domyn, CosineAI), Igor Carron points out the overlooked French company LightOn:
- Built several LLMs in France as early as 2021
- Behind ModernBERT and the recent LateOn/mLateOn multivector retrieval models — all open source, with 70M+ downloads on Hugging Face
- Went public on Euronext Growth in 2024
- Participated in the BLOOM project (179B-parameter open multilingual model); now offers an enterprise GenAI platform
The original post argues Europe is genuinely entering the AI race and could lead in open-source sovereign models — unthinkable 12 months ago.
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