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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

#71
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 inste…

Deepseek didn't show anything except the compute cost of final model. We don't know how much data collection costed, how much unethical data like copyrighted data or OpenAI's data is needed, the cost of experiments etc.

> Creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.

If they have this as their top priority and allotted few billion dollars then sure. Not in the current form where the people involved are only involved for publication, not doing hard engineering things that takes months or years and they could do the same thing in OpenAI or Deepseek for like $1 million salary which both of them pay.

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

#72
post #39
post #13

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 roo…

I wish you the best of luck. However, this is basically a still just a European joint research project (admittedly compatibly well funded) with similar partners that have been also connected before in other research projects. To really compete in the space it will require new ideas, great talent and good leadership towards a common goal. I have myself been part of many EU funded projects and know the difficulty of re…

So, if one has a well thought-through idea, what is the process of getting the resources ($$$) from OpenEuroLLM and the compute from EuroHPC? How do I become a partner as a long-standing engineer with plenty of industry practice in research and development?

I am asking this because I never really understood how EU funds are working, they always seemed to me as there's a lot of gate keeping.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

” The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence.” They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.

> They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists. I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior. Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.

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

#74

I'm HIGHLY sceptical. The academics will love it, because they get money. But look at that list of parties involved. More than twenty parties supplying people; none of them will have this initiative on the top of their list of loyalties and priorities. Meaning, everyone will talk, noone will take charge, some millions change hands and we continue with business as usual. Instead this should have been a single new non-…

You just described all EU tech subsidies.

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

#75
> will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open

I am VERY curious about that. Will they open up ALL the training data? Which would be a massive amount I'd guess, but I'd be curious where they got it and how they got it. Inb4 they just take some meta model and retrain it and then only publish the data from the fine tuned training.

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

#76

So for €52mn you'll get... a worse Llama? But don't worry, it'll be "transparent and compliant" which will make people want to use it. Very European.

That'd be very very good actually. I'd be happy if institutions would use that where one could TECHNICALLY (maybe just a miniscule amount of people would do that) verify data from end to end, instead of some "open" model that is actually not open at all. A little worse performance is a good trade-off imo

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

#77

So for €52mn you'll get... a worse Llama? But don't worry, it'll be "transparent and compliant" which will make people want to use it. Very European.

> a worse Llama?

As someone who lives here, I'd actually be surprised if we even got that. I expect lots of taxpayer funded websites, manifestos, PowerPoints and numerous discussions and ultimately nothing.

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

#78

I'm HIGHLY sceptical. The academics will love it, because they get money. But look at that list of parties involved. More than twenty parties supplying people; none of them will have this initiative on the top of their list of loyalties and priorities. Meaning, everyone will talk, noone will take charge, some millions change hands and we continue with business as usual. Instead this should have been a single new non-…

I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail. As a person who's in this type of projects for a long time, what I can say is "it works", because people do not compete with each other, but will build it together. What I can say is, if they have came this far, there's already plans about what to do, and how to do,…

I largely see this type of collaboration as a very inefficient form of a distributed company (team) where members of that team do not have other incentive but to (mostly) collect points on research papers. There is no incentive to actually build a product in such a setting and there is no incentive to remain competitive since you cannot be fired, or penalized in some other form. And generally speaking, as an individual you don't care about the industry (market) competition since you mostly care about remaining relevant within your very narrow scope of your research topic. So, this is why this doesn't work. There is no coherent mass toward the same goal. Seemingly there is but there isn't.

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

#79

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/

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

#80
post #44

United we stand, divided we fall. More than LLMs, Europe needs chip autonomy. ASAP. Own fabs, own IP.

There are companies like infineon and elmos in germany (and i think a handful more). So it is happening, just not (yet) with consumer products
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