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Discussion (97 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Sure… they can, except at the end of the day it’s a bit late, regulatory burden will make it comparatively useless, and because of that nobody will ever use it. It will be spending a bunch of taxpayer dollars for press releases.
The running joke is that when these “sovereign” EU models launch, they’re going to refuse to answer anything that might involve personal information such as Elon Musk’s birthday.
You take current version and build on top of it. You have the weights.
You might not get some n+1 version at some point but the n version you will have will be still most likely much better than whatever you come up with burning good will money of people believing in „sovereignty”.
You are not getting ahead in this game by being „true to your local values” capital expenditure is insane in this game.
Assuming us Europeans finally get our act together, I think it is better for our long-term future (and the ethical problems) if we manage to get a baseline of training input and data ourselves, from scratch, with everything being ethically sourced.
Oh and, while we're at it, the EU has 24 official languages plus a host of minority languages. Most LLMs focus on the English, German, French and Chinese languages, but everything else is... left behind at best. An European model with actual funding and proper data sources might be able to significantly reduce that.
[1] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6245677
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...
I guess we’re going for GPT2 level capability?
[0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...
> GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.”
That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to start with something, then ramp up, rather do what only a select few labs been able to do, start with really big models. Especially if you're resource constrained, which since this is a government project, I really hope for the sake of the tax payers it was.
They do really good R&D on a lot of stuff. This is just their attempt at public credibility/internal skill building to enter the LLM business.
Doubt its going to be successful, but they "waste" a lot more money on other things that you never heard of. Its not fraud, its just R&D dressed up a little too much too early.
Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running.
What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?
Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.
They are not neutral technology, they are a direct representation of the training set that has been chosen and how they are aligned.
In many ways, they are ideology made code.
If we leave building them to the US and China, only their way of seeing things will be digitized.
I don't like the idea of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, and EU Green eco-communists and NIMBVYs don't want to have data centers built in their backyard, so the only way left for EU consultancies to milk taxpayer money for the AI bubble, is shipping a sovereign AI model for each country/language.
Watch out US tech sector, we're coming for you. Feel our wrath.
Ignorant comment
ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.
And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.
So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.
@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?
And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.
And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.
Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.
Well, then this is will be a good start.
So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priority list.
Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.
Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546
So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.
Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".
At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud.
With AI, it is even more strategic.
What a wild statement, VC's are behind most of the growth in the US economy, and they directly drive up wages in tech. I'd be fascinated to hear a valid complaint of VC's that isn't just money envy
What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photos.
Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined
Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.
In many cases, well-established and well-liked European services have been supplanted by American counterparts that came later and were not really better in any way. They did usually have much more money to burn though, undercutting pricing until competition was dead.
I'm speaking in the past tense, because now for the first time in the couple of decades I can remember, there seems to be a somewhat commonly held preference for European suppliers.
But you know what hurts the most? That I know it wasn't always that way.
I'm sitting right now in the same country that invented the Minitel, built out the TGV network and the Grands Projets, and don't even get me started about the weird and wonderful machines they've got in that museum in Mulhouse, hell, you could go back in time to Gustave Eiffel. Industry and ambition used to be here. It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.
Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing
I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.
You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.
1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now.
2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI AI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't work with Europe"?
There's a whole bunch of grey in between the two, for example only having access to second rate models, but I'm not sure that particularly matters if the strategy is "second mover."
My ex-neighbor (when I was a teenager, living in Belgium) and very good friend really wanted to make it big. He became a chip engineer, moved to California, raised money for a first startup (it tanked) then raised money for a second startup. He made the world a better place (he created some very specific micro-inverters for solar panels) and made a $$$ exit.
The EU saw exactly zero of the wealth he created and he's never ever coming back to what he considers a failure of a continent.
That's the problem: many of the great minds with the mindset required to do great things already left the EU.
> So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.
And in energy (economy is energy and energy is economy, and China really understood that) the EU doomed itself to be in the hands of Russia.
We are a failure of sinking continent.
Regulations are not even throughout each of the 27 member states. Each country is relatively small in the world stage.
Until EU progresses towards federalization, discussing this is a moot point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A1lia_(LLM)
> This public investment underlines the importance of an independent, trustworthy and future‑proof Dutch language model.
It does, but not in the way you think it does.
They're training a model, not funding a startup. €13.5 million is plenty to pre- and post-train a decent model.
And they're going to train an LLM with all kinds of extra difficulties compared to OpenAI for just 13.5M?
The very first Llama was 16M for one training.
All these tiny niche models are perhaps fun as an academic exercise or great for the researchers resume but I highly doubt that they'll add any value or will be used for anything serious.
Even if this becomes a somewhat decent model with a fantastic understanding of "gezellig", "kring verjaardag" or "pannenkoeken", how many people will interact with it before the limits of it will drive them back to a frontier model?
Even if the purpose of this is government & other regulated industries, do we really want our government to use a poor model? Either do it right or don't do it at all.
Why don't they work together on it? Companies like Airbus have already been able to do that with aircraft.
An ecosystem is the tribal knowledge, revolving door of talent, known processes etc.
If the end goal is to make a half assed Dutch speaking model, I think it won’t cut it. I don’t see anyone using it over Gemma 4b that runs on my laptop.
An ecosystem is more durable and has desirable second order effects.
#define(HARMFUL)
[edit] Downvoters please tell me what the problem is with specifying this?