I can’t help rooting for tiny open source AI model maker Arcee

Arcee, a tiny 26-person U.S. startup that built a massive, 400B-parameter open source LLM on a $20 million shoestring budget, has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” claims CEO Mark McQuade to TechCrunch. As that comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but root for: it wants to give U.S. and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a Chinese-based one.