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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

#81

Post by andai »

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…

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak).

So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please."

I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Time to fix it but it's still there.

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

#82

Post by instagraham »

coliveira wrote: post #80
hombre_fatal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

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

#84

Post by mistrial9 »

amarant wrote: post #74
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

different models have been very different in this way.. almost ten years ago the French made a very large effort to capture languages.. the release notes I read at the time IIR had quite a few languages from South Asia / India, and in Africa. The language that was prominently missing was German IIR. I cannot say for the 2025-2026 models since so much has happened.. but models are not equal.

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

#85

Post by apple2026 »

andai wrote: post #81
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…

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right? I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak). So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please." I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Ti…

[dead]

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

#86

Post by rafram »

> Marius Husnes, the Head of IT Platform at the library (Nasjonlbiblioteket) discussed the project at Huawei’s ID Forum 2026 in Paris, saying that no commercial LLM provider was developing a local (Norwegian) language LLM. 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 am not overly confident that Marius Husnes knows what he’s talking about here.

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

#87

Post by mistrial9 »

vidarh wrote: post #66
e12e wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd, I'd imagine Wikisource (in many/all languages) would be part of training data for all LLMs with SOTA ambition? https://no.wikisource.org/wiki/De_knyttede_n%C3%A6ver

You'd think so. It seems like there are a lot of odd gaps like that. I also have a favourite English language PhD thesis I ask every new model about that they still struggle to find even though there's a Wikipedia article about it that links a blog post I wrote about it. Anyone who thinks they've exhausted even publicly crawlable resources should ask them about some obscure stuff.

you might be surprised if you take this approach.. give key words and phrases in small amounts, each sentence of a prompt building on a previous sentence. Take a an example that is not very hard, like Lewis Carrol Alice in Wonderland original text. Although a quick question might get things sort of wrong, or miss details, if you guide the LLM to a certain part of the story, then a certain set of characters in that part of the story, then a certain statement or dramatic moment with those characters in that part of the story, you might get very specific detail that is close to line-by-line accurate. On the other hand, if you ask a quick, ordinary question about the same part of the story without supplying context and character names, you get something equally vague. YMMV

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

#88

Post by spiderfarmer »

rafram wrote: post #86

> Marius Husnes, the Head of IT Platform at the library (Nasjonlbiblioteket) discussed the project at Huawei’s ID Forum 2026 in Paris, saying that no commercial LLM provider was developing a local (Norwegian) language LLM. 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…

It sounds plausible enough to get subsidies.

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

#89

Post by cortesoft »

coliveira wrote: post #80
hombre_fatal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't those people be asking the questions in their own language in the first place? The model will reply in the language you use. This thread is about people asking for information about a language that is not the one they are messaging the LLM in

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

#90

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

a2128 wrote: post #69
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.

What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool…

It's also a bit funny because Norway definitely has enough money to hire a team of Anthropic's best to go out there and train them a model that does whatever they want. They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor.
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