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  underlines
  Please challenge me and explain why this is a break through worth the headline they use for their own work.How I understand it, without really reading into it:- Thomson Reuters did not "create" a frontier model, they gave some money, maybe a bit of their data to Imperial College London, and took Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Model for a basic fine tune.- "They" (some undergrads at Imperial College London) used an existing ablation framework to undo some of the topic alignment of the original model.- "They" fine tuned on some domain knowledge trying to preserve general knowledge - here maybe, just maybe some data came from Thomson Reuters.As a result: one of 100's of Qwen 3.6 35B A3B sparse model fine tunes, just for publicity, to write overstating headlines like "X created their own frontier model"
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  cootsnuck
  This is going to increasingly happen over the years to come. Big organizations will become more sophisticated with operationalizing their data, training and running LLMs will continue to be demystified and accessible, and over time we'll get more and more specialized / industry-specific models.It's going to become another way to monetize your informational assets if you're a big older enterprise with troves of data. All you need is time to figure out how to make it useful for yourself and then eventually sell access to it however you want.Think of all the data that big orgs have that isn't accessible to all the AI labs to suck up.
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  johnnypangs
  Here is some more technical information on how this was trained, as well as a download link.https://huggingface.co/thomsonreuters/Thomson-1.0-Small(Full disclosure I’m a TR employee, although I had nothing to do with making this)
• scirob
  Maybe it's my dyslexic brain but "it's own frontier model" in my head converted to foundational model that was trained from scratch.But this is qwen based.But w/e I'm pro AI so more companies having more people with skills for more post training is cool
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  Arcuru
  > starting from a strong open-source foundation and investing $40 million to train ThomsonSounds like they spent $40 million finetuning an open weight model on their own data? I wonder what they built on.
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  x313
  Pretty cool someone is still doing this. Training in house LLMs was extremely popular in 2023-2024, back when domain-specific LLMs could easily top GPT in their field. In my field alone (tax/HR tech) I remember that Intuit, Workday, Indeed, LinkedIn were all training internal models.It eventually stopped making sense because of inference costs. Running something internal with 30% GPU utilization is just too cost inefficient compared to using an API. Idk how Reuters will manage to solve this fundamental problem.
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  elpakal
  > Our evaluation found Thomson’s citation quality generally competitive with leading frontier models, even when tested on Canadian employment-law questions without a Canada-specific setting.That’s it? It was generally competitive with leading frontier models? Neat, but why would someone pay for frontier models and also a generally competitive additional product?
• JSR_FDED
  Cool that they did this on top of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. If they have their own collection of valuable data this is the only way to make sure it doesn’t end up in general purpose models. That’s probably enough justification for the $40m spend - continued control of your destiny as an information provider.
• peddling-brink
  > Thomson Reuters is also making a “small” version of Thomson available as an open-weight model on Hugging Face for academic and non-commercial use to further aid in this validation.Looking forward to the ERP fine-tune.
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  dash2
  Has anyone found a link to the technical report? They don’t seem very keen to publicise their performance on evals…
• anon
  undefined
• Havoc
  40m sounds quite heavy for a qwen fine tune?
• TokenLat
  [flagged]
• garn810
  [dead]
• fenestella
  [flagged]
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  echelon
  I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M.This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line.Or IBM selling Watson.Or Mozilla chasing every which thing.They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see.Reuters is too important for this.If they were trying to use this as a narrative affront to OpenAI and Anthropic, maybe, but this is Reuters, not a deeply political organization seeking to land gotchas against big tech.
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  neontrashfence
  Afaik... Lord Jacob Rothschild is 30% owner of Woodbridge, which holds Reuters. I believe the Thomson family owns the rest... The richest family in Canada. Woodbridge owns large shares of textbook companies, radio stations, news services, wires, scientific journals past and present.