Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eurollm.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 629 posts

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

#561

Post by hopelite »

class4behavior wrote: post #527
hopelite wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about control. It is a fundamental difference in perspective and mentality regarding control. America is or at least was largely oriented around indirect control or outcome oriented objectives, where Europe is largely oriented around direct control or prescribed objectives. It’s also enshrined in our respective governments and the foundational philosophies that underpin them. The US Declaration of Independence s…

JfC, this is so confidently wrong, it's absurd.

Odd that you confidently declare it as such without providing any argument whatsoever or basis of any kind at all.

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

#562

Post by palata »

jkukul wrote: post #446
stingraycharles wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with these grant proposal things is that it favors established businesses over small founders. Establishes businesses have much more resources to go through all the legal / red tape issues. I’ve seen this in practice with innovation subsidies: small startup has to spend a lot of time to go though all the hoops, taking up significant resources, to get modest compensation for actual innovative work. Larger busi…

this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections. The EU is also great at creating a heavy regulatory environment. Which entrenches existing incumbents. So the EU creates barriers that favor big companies, then tries to fix it with grants that... also favor big companies. And then everyone's surprised that there's no innovation in Europe. From all the world's compani…

I have seen a lot of successful European startups over the years. They just get bought by the US eventually.

In part probably because it's harder to become a monopoly in the EU.

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

#563

Post by jonathanstrange »

coldtea wrote: post #542
beeforpork wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)? Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

> 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language. > Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect. That's more because academic linguistics, as d…

> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.

As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.

The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.

I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?

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

#564

Post by runarberg »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #486
purrcat259 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible. Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.

Writing RTL or LTR and alphabet alone don't make a language different. Hindi and Urdu are 90% the exact same language, and are mutually inteligible (Urdu speaker and Hindi speaker can have complete full conversation with each other) but each is written differently (one LTR the other RTL) and with different alphabets

See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.

In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.

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

#565

Post by ogogmad »

englishrookie wrote: post #468
skissane wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.

By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.

I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.

The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.

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

#566

Post by pier25 »

berkes wrote: post #494
pier25 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you talk to most EU business owners, even in tech, the limiting factor isn't regulations. I have a tech startup in Estonia and I agree. To me the biggest limiting factor is lack of funding.

The root cause of that is the lack of a true Capital Market union. In the US, you can get VC across state borders and VC can invest in any US company regardless of their location. Not in the EU. Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible. And even if managed, now that NL investor has to repeat the entire process for Poland, Spain, Malta and other countries. EU Made Simple explains…

Thanks for the video!

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

#567

Post by kazga »

coldtea wrote: post #542
beeforpork wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)? Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

> 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language. > Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect. That's more because academic linguistics, as d…

> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim

> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.

It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.

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

#569

Post by adastra22 »

funac wrote: post #480
adastra22 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying UK and US speak a different language? No one doubts it’s a different dialect, but we are talking about languages.

that is a political distinction

Mutual intelligibility is not a political distinction.

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

#570

Post by sofixa »

carlosjobim wrote: post #367
sofixa wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited. If you manage to get 10 million customers, your business is already successful on a gigantic scale, and you should have all the know-how in taking on the world. The success of other people is rarely the reason why you are failing in your own life. Start somewher…

> Europe money is only thrown to real estate owners and any enterprising people with a dream are cordially invited to fucking forget about it, shut up, and fall back in line.

That's simply not true. Europe is a continent that includes startup powerhouse Sweden, UK that has a ton of them too, and France that is making massive strides (just check out Station F). It might be true in Slovakia or whatever, but you simply cannot say that broadly for the whole continent.

> That's true and it's awesome

Is it? It is to an extent, but it also encourages nonsense (Juicero, the AI spice mixer), pump and dump tech-isation of existing stuff with no business model (Wework) and outright scams (Theranos, Nikola).

If the barrier to entry to get money thrown at you is so low, a lot of it gets wasted. So the rest really really has to make it big, which gives some perverse incentives (like Uber dumping to driver old school taxis out of business to then jack up prices, because if they're not a monopoly/biggest fish in town, they wouldn't have been worth it)

Post reply on HN