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EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

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Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#231

Post by _kidlike »

adzm wrote: post #2

For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language. Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages. All the others ar…

In Greek we call our language Hellenic, and our country Hellas. "Greek" / "Greece" don't exist in the Hellenic language.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#232

Post by deaux »

miohtama wrote: post #142
KaiserPro wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money. Why work in the "europoor" countries when you can go to america and earn megabucks.

That's capital markets and the lack of capital markets is because of not having business friendly environment. Consumer protections strong, pro business not so much. Companies like Spotify go to the US to IPO.

Are you saying that the other 199 non-US countries in the world all have a business unfriendly environment, since every one of them besides China has practically the same amount of software VC funding compared to the US?

All of these purported EU-specific reasons completely ignore that things are the same elsewhere. It's the US that is the outlier.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#233

Post by pembrook »

whazor wrote: post #221
loandbehold wrote: post #10

Aren't all frontier models already able to use all these languages? Support for specific languages doesn't need to be built in, LLMs support all languages because they are trained on multilingual data.

European governments have huge collections of digitalised books, research, public data. But also European culture could maybe make a difference? You can already see big differences between Grok and ChatGPT in terms of values.

If it's publicly available data, books and research, I can assure you the big models have already all been trained on it.

European culture is already embedded in all the models, unless the people involved in this project have some hidden trove of private data that they're training on which diverges drastically from things Europeans have published publicly (I'm 99.9% positive they don't...especially given Europe's alarmist attitude around anything related to data).

I think people don't understand a huge percentage of the employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. are non-US born.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#234

Post by dzikimarian »

alecco wrote: post #213
dzikimarian wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While grant process in EU isn't fun, I think Levels has bit of an ego issues. He mentioned that if he had issues like that on eg X, he would see Elon himself in the replies. While he is great at converting his influencer status to income in his micro-SaaS projects, I don't think running ad-fueled browser games on state-sponsored super computer should be really aim of these grant programs.

He is 100% right on this one. From personal experience trying to figure out EU. Lawyer bureaucrats manage funds behind red tape clearly meant to be for their pals. All these while the EU is running out of funds and in a process of de-industrialization. There should be an independent corruption investigation on Brussels.

I took part in application for EU grants a few times and our company group did it many times over the years.

It's bureaucracy, often bordering with stupidity. You may need advisors to navigate all their forms & processes. But it certainly isn't "pals-only" type of deal.

On the other hand - is it harder than getting VC funding? For seasoned founder with reputation - probably. For fresh startup - probably not.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#235

Post by deaux »

sofixa wrote: post #168
whimsicalism wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. This being the #1 reason is such a tired trope. Okay, what is the limiting factor? Because when I talk to EU business owners (admittedly, very few) - they point to lack of big EU capital markets, which is directly downstream of the policy environment. And when I talk to top EU human capital, they all point to the lack of…

> Okay, what is the limiting factor A few. A big part is that the EU is a collection of countries that (with very few exceptions) have different languages and laws. For a company to serve Spain and France, for instance, it would need to translate everything, hire local lawyers and customer support agents. Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the oppo…

> This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.

Ding ding ding! When China does it with solar and EVs we call it "dumping". When Uber, OpenAI and Anthropic do it, that term is never ever used. VC funded US techs dumps harder than any Chinese industry ever has.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#236

Post by [deleted] »

softwaredoug wrote: post #165
whimsicalism wrote: post #57

[flagged]

Is the point of these policies to pick winners? Or to upskill the creators and stimulate the economy by giving possible entrepreneurs experience Europeans can't get in big tech? In the US, some ex-Googler might found a startup. Europe doesn't have the equivalent of FAANG. (Europe-wide companies are not quite as easy as US-wide) Even if the super computer itself "fails", is the goal actually the secondary impacts to t…

[deleted]

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#237

Post by purrcat259 »

adzm wrote: post #41
purrcat259 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read, write and speak Maltese, AMA if you are curious about the language.

I'm actually really curious about everyday usage of the language; is code switching between English and Maltese more common than Maltese on its own? I've seen a few online communities where the vocabulary switches between Maltese and English very often which is interesting but I wonder how much of that is just online / written versus everyday speech.

Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.

There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.

Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#239

Post by jimbob45 »

mezod wrote: post #212
whimsicalism wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah best to lean in more on national and linguistic fragmentation, diversity has always been one of the EUs strengths

if that's the argument, let's drop all the languages and focus on english :)

You’ve got to pick one as a lingua franca. English is already popular but Spanish, French, or Esperanto would all work just fine.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#240

Post by NicuCalcea »

kreetx wrote: post #178
NicuCalcea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language. Well, that and Romanian. And Hungarian. And outside the EU, Albanian. And Georgian, Azeri and Armenian if you consider those Eastern Europe.

I regret being that loose with the designation :), Romanian and Hungarian are valid counter arguments. In my mind, I was thinking of the belt of countries between Russia and Central Europe, starting from the Baltics down to the Balkan (excluding Greece).

Even by your definition, I can count at least seven countries where the official language is not Slavic. And that's not even including all the Altaic, Romance and other assortment of regional languages, many of which have some sort of official status.
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