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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

#71

Post by orbital-decay »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures, so it's untrue at least for the "any" qualifier. Performance is barely affected or might be even better sometimes. However English patterns can subtly leak into native patterns of other languages. It's obviously very different for low-resource languages, but to improve them you need more data, not a new model.

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

#72

Post by black_puppydog »

WatchDog wrote: post #57
KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I have to remind them every time lest they come back with "uh, didn't find anything relevant, here take some hallucinations instead."

So, given the anglo-centrism of current models, my confidence in American providers giving any shits about non-american users/use-cases is pretty low. And lower the smaller the language community is.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #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…

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by amarant »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

Not remotely true in my estimation. I don't really speak Norwegian, but I do speak Swedish(which means I mostly understand Norwegian as they're very similar). Every model I've tried speaking Swedish to does it perfectly. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for Norwegian already

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

#75

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

arjie wrote: post #24

This can’t be right. 2 PB of flash is like $200k. It’s within reach of many individuals. Then again I guess you don’t need that much storage so maybe it is.

Also my first thought: "Is that... a lot?"

You can put 6PB (244TB * 24) into a single box these days.

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

#76

Post by hombre_fatal »

black_puppydog wrote: post #72
WatchDog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I h…

Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

If you’re doing this on a daily basis, then you should have an AGENTS.md that accumulates directional instructions like this.

This is how you use the tool correctly.

There’s this weird pattern I’ve noticed where people expect LLMs to require zero effort or proficiency on their part, and when the LLM isn’t perfect without it, of course it wasn’t; LLMs suck.

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

#77

Post by _cs2017_ »

WatchDog wrote: post #57
KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

> Why go to the expense...

Answer: idiocy of decision makers and the desire to get resources by those who created the proposal.

I assumed Scandinavia has better decision processes but apparently I was wrong.

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

#78

Post by alliao »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

yeah and alignment is all about how to be less evil which is no easy job... I can just imagine Chinese LLM renders 1989 tianmen square as an incident orchestrated by CIA which CCP successfully thwarted etc etc

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

#79

Post by Barrin92 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #71
KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "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 thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures, so it's untrue at least for the "any" qualifier. Performance is barely affected or might be even better sometimes. However English patterns can subtly leak into native patterns of other languages. It's obviously very different for low-resource languages, but to improve them you need more data, not a new model.

>Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures

strong disagree on that one. As a German interacting with ChatGPT, even in German it gives me the feeling of talking to the Pluribus people, which reminds me of an anecdote of Walmart failing in Germany because people were freaked out by the constantly upbeat, smiling employees.

Understanding a culture is a very different task than translating the syntax of a text, and these systems might be capable of syntactic fluency but they do not really understand culture. You have to metaphorically abuse these models until they stop sounding like the crossover of a HR department person and a Mormon missionary

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

#80

Post by coliveira »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #76
black_puppydog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I h…

Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step. If you’re doing this on a daily basis, then you should have an AGENTS.md that accumulates directional instructions like this. This is how you use the tool correctly. There’s this weird pattern I’ve noticed where people expect LLMs to require zero effort or profic…

The issue is that French, Italian, African, Japanese people shouldn't have the inconvenience of instructing the LLM tool to get the basic facts about their own culture. They should use an LLM that has already been trained like that by default. Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American. If I go to Google for example I want to get facts about my own country in my own language.
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