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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

#121

Post by jpdus »

2-3-7-43-1807 wrote: post #81
jpdus wrote: 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…

> Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources is that a new take? cause so far deepseek was considered as proof for small companies being able to compete with big players like openai ...

might be debatable - but I tend to agree with Dario Amodei on this; my guess is that R1 is 7-10 months behind the internal frontier at the big labs, while having a few small novel tricks. (But i might err, will be interesting to see the development going forward)

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

bayindirh wrote: post #88
closewith wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon, because I don't think any independent observer could look at Horizon projects and say they just work.

> This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon. No, I'm not dependent on Horizon Programme. I just look at what we did, the outcomes, and talk from that point. Maybe our sphere is one of the ones which deliver. I can't see the whole thing, it's too big to observe. Even if we're in the 5% which delivers, which is same with the startup scene, which is loudly applauded because it's an incre…

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by bayindirh »

murderfs wrote: post #119
input_sh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider for example Firefox' completely-local translations a success? Directly funded by Horizon, made by a consortium of 4 European universities, now a part of Firefox?

They paid three million euros to integrate existing open source software into Firefox?!

No, EU funded Bergamot and HPLT projects. Integration came much later, but again as a part of Bergamot project.

[0]: https://browser.mt/

[1]: https://hplt-project.org/

[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/translations?tab=readme-ov-file#a...

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

#125

Post by jpdus »

menaerus wrote: post #72
riedel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There definitely is - but that we, as a startup that is barely a year old and not widely known outside our niche in AI dev circles and on Huggingface, are part of this is already a sign that times are changing.

To be fair: We probably couldn't have handled the paperwork without LLM´s - but due to this technology, the process was still long and involved but manageable.

(BTW: We´re hiring, if you really want to work on this ;-). As a freelancer/solo entrepreneur this will be difficult though..)

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

#126

Post by mhitza »

moffkalast wrote: post #5
htrp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mistral can't be arsed to bother beyond French and German. Any more details here or a writeup you can link to?

My own experience mainly, only Gemma seems to have been any good for Slavic languages so far, and only the 27B when unquantized is reliable enough to be in any way usable. Ravenwolf posts tests on his German benchmarks every so often in locallama and most models seem to do well enough, but I've heard some claims from people about Mistral's being their favorite models in German anyhow. And I think Mistral-Large scores…

In my experience Mistral (at least Nemo) works well with other languages. Don't know about Slavic languages but it does Romanian, with apparent issues around the translation of technical terms.

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

#127

Post by jpdus »

MR4D wrote: post #48
jpdus wrote: 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…

The money doesn’t matter. The goals don’t matter. The people don’t matter. The only thing that matters is how much regulatory red tape is involved. My guess is that the paperwork will kill this. Read the announcement. Too much discussion about regulatory framework. In the US or China, all you need is some money and smart people. That’s a very low barrier to getting moving forward.

I agree that the announcement should´ve talked more about goals and performance than regulatory stuff ;-).

But I think there is a new understanding among the bureaucracy that regulation (alone, without innovation) will kill Europe´s competitiveness and that some acceleration and cutting of red tape is necessary.

Can't say with certainty that this will be successful. But that we, as a very young startup that is barely known outside of our AI Open Source niche, are part of this, is already a sign in itself - a year ago I´d have never believed that this might be an option (and also probably would've declined if someone asked us to join a EU-funded project).

We will have engineers without a degree (but hundreds of thousands of HF downloads) working side-by-side with some of the top researchers + HPC centers.

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

#130

Post by shinryuu »

bayindirh wrote: post #124
murderfs wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They paid three million euros to integrate existing open source software into Firefox?!

No, EU funded Bergamot and HPLT projects. Integration came much later, but again as a part of Bergamot project. [0]: https://browser.mt/ [1]: https://hplt-project.org/ [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/translations?tab=readme-ov-file#a...

Very grateful for those translations. Use them a lot!
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