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Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

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Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#11
> The Olivia system is an HPE Cray Supercomputing EX system, with 448 GPUs and 64,512 CPU cores.

Training a sovereign LLM with this meager hardware as opposed to a LORA on some open source model seems like a huge mistake and a potential red flag.

There is no way these people have the resources to train a fully fledged LLM, so claiming that is their goal makes me think they don't intend for the LLM to be useful.

Which begs the question, whose money are they wasting - and why?

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#12
post #8

>As Husnes put it; Norway is a small country solving a problem every non-English-speaking nation will face: how do you build AI that reflects your language, your culture and your history? AI needs custodians, not just builders. I'm afraid the answer is, mostly you don't. Such a thing requires strong political will that, at least in my environment, seems basically impossible to align. The costs are prohibitive, but be…

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Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#16

> The Olivia system is an HPE Cray Supercomputing EX system, with 448 GPUs and 64,512 CPU cores. Training a sovereign LLM with this meager hardware as opposed to a LORA on some open source model seems like a huge mistake and a potential red flag. There is no way these people have the resources to train a fully fledged LLM, so claiming that is their goal makes me think they don't intend for the LLM to be useful. Which…

That's what they have access to right now. I am sure that will change in the future as the project progresses.

What do you suggest, that they stop and wait until they have the right HW?

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#17
post #13

As a Norwegian this sounds like a mistake. Who will use this LLM? Where? For what? The underlying data could be made more easily searchable and digestible for agents in general if the goal is better knowledge of Norwegian culture.

Exactly, if there's one thing transformers are good at it's translation. One I've found particularly nice: any question ChatGPT can answer in English it can answer in French. I'm assuming Norwegian too. So there's no point.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#18
post #13

As a Norwegian this sounds like a mistake. Who will use this LLM? Where? For what? The underlying data could be made more easily searchable and digestible for agents in general if the goal is better knowledge of Norwegian culture.

Hard disagree. This is the first step not the last and proves to other countries that this can be done.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#19
post #4

> He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language. I don’t know this is true. But whatever sounds true enough and gets funding seems to be what flies these days.

They made the cultural case, you have no idea how strong this is in places like quebec, nordics, france, russia etc

Can confirm that. Norway may have a small population, but if you live there you'll think it's truly the center of the world (aside from the US. Norwegians love America)
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