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Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

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Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#11

Post by moffkalast »

jampekka wrote: post #6
moffkalast wrote: post #3

> The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence As a European, that's practically an oxymoron. The more one limits oneself to legally clean data, the worse the models will be. I hate to be pessimistic from the get go, but it doesn't sound like anything useful will be produced by this and we'll have to keep r…

What do you mean by relying on Google? Llama 3.1 and DeepSeek v3/R1 largest models are rather good at even a niche language like Finnish. The performance does plummet in the smaller versions, and even quantization may harm multilinguality disproportionally. Something like deliberately distilling specific languages from the largest models could work well. Starting from scratch with a "legal" dataset will most likely f…

Yes I think small languages which have a total corpus of maybe a few hundred million tokens total have no chance of producing a coherent model without synthetic data. And using synthetic data from existing models trained on all public (and less public) data is enough of a legally gray area that I wouldn't expect this project to consider it, so it's doomed before it even starts.

Something like 4o is so perfect in most languages that one could just make an infinite dataset from it and be done with it. I'm not sure how OAI managed it tbh.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#12

Post by everyone »

sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Not anymore, with Deepseek's stuff right? Which is open.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#13

Post by jpdus »

As someone who is in general skeptical of programs like this (and an European) there are 2 remarkable / timely things about this:

- This project doesn't just allocate money to universities or one large company, but includes top research institutions as well as startups and GPU time on supercomputing clusters. The participants are very well connected (e.g. also supported by HF, Together and the likes with European roots) - Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources, but you can stay sufficient close to the frontier to make a dent.

Europe needs to try this. Will this close the Gap to the US/China? Probably not. But it could be a catalyst for competitive Open source models and partially revitalize AI in Europe. let's see..

PS: on Twitter there was a screenshot yesterday that in a new EU draft, "accelerate" was used six times. Maybe times are changing a little bit.

Disclaimer: Our company is part of this project, so I might be biased.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#14

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

everyone wrote: post #12
sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Not anymore, with Deepseek's stuff right? Which is open.

DeepSeek probably spent closer to two billion on hardware. And then there’s the energy cost of numerous runs, staff costs, all of that. The 5.5m cost was basically misleading info, maybe used strategically to create doubt in the US tech industry or for DeepSeek’s parent hedge fund to make money off shorts.

https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#15

Post by Etheryte »

sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Personally I'm rather happy that the allocation was not too large at first, even that is quite a sizeable sum. The EU is great at kickstarting projects that sound like a panacea, but end up not leading to anything. Once they have something to show, by all means, throw more money at them.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#17

Post by [deleted] »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #14
everyone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore, with Deepseek's stuff right? Which is open.

DeepSeek probably spent closer to two billion on hardware. And then there’s the energy cost of numerous runs, staff costs, all of that. The 5.5m cost was basically misleading info, maybe used strategically to create doubt in the US tech industry or for DeepSeek’s parent hedge fund to make money off shorts. https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/

[deleted]

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#18

Post by nradov »

Etheryte wrote: post #15
sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Personally I'm rather happy that the allocation was not too large at first, even that is quite a sizeable sum. The EU is great at kickstarting projects that sound like a panacea, but end up not leading to anything. Once they have something to show, by all means, throw more money at them.

The trap that these EU projects typically fall into is that they burn all of the grant funding on paying politically connected consultants to write reports. No one gets around to building an MVP.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#19

Post by esperent »

sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Deepseek's release has shown that there's no great risk in getting left behind. All the info is out there, people with skills are readily available, creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.

For everyone here shouting that the EU needs to do something, be a leader, what have they lost so far by choosing to lead in legislation instead of development?

They've lost nothing. They've gained a lot.

They can use the same frontier level open source model as everyone else, and meanwhile, they can stay on top of harmful uses like social or credit scoring.

Also speaking as a European, legislation is kind of the point of a government in the first place. I do think the EU goes too far in many cases. But I haven't seen anything that makes me think they're dealing with this particular hype train badly so far. Play the safe long game, let everyone else spend all the money, see what works, focus on legislation of potentially dangerous technology.

Re: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

#20

Post by sarusso »

everyone wrote: post #12
sarusso wrote: post #8

They allocated €37.4 million [1]. As an European, I truly don’t understand why they keep ignoring that the money required for such projects is at least an order of magnitude more. [1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...

Not anymore, with Deepseek's stuff right? Which is open.

DeepSeek had plenty of R&D expertise which were not included in the (declared) model training cost. Here we are talking about building something nearly from scratch, even if there is an open source starting point you still need the infrastructure, expertise and people to make it work, which with that budget are going to be hard to secure. Moreover these projects take months and months to get approved, meaning that this one was conceived long before DeepSeek, thus highlighting the original disalignment between the goal and the budget. DeepSeek might have changed the scenario (I hope so) but it would be just a lucky ex-post event… not a conscious choice behind that budget.
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