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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

#151

Post by kalli »

joe_mamba wrote: post #124
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor. Which is bizarre to me Norway doesn't have a booming tech sector with all hat wealth fund acting as the biggest VC. They instead use their wealth fund to invest in US's tech sector. Baffling.

The point of the fund is to invest outside of Norway so as to avoid the Norwegian economy overheating and increasing inflation

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

#152

Post by blks »

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.

Because state of the art models are owned and controlled by foreign agents.

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

#153

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

I've noticed that it also imposes american moral judgements on certain things, even though it reasons (sometimes) in the native language.

I was trying to work out how and when to use swear words, and the relative power index of them. it translated english swear words into the target language then lectured me on not using them.

It took a bunch of prodding for it to actually think as the target language to then get the (mostly) correct response.

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

#154

Post by ampersandwhich »

bblb wrote: post #97
Barrin92 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I'm Finnish and dear god I hate the default overtly friendly tones of LLMs. Always the first thing to tune in system prompt. You're a machine, stop anthropomorphizing yourself and pretending to be my best friend, and just give me the damn answer and nothing else. :D

I fully agree. I'm Swedish and have recently used GPT to help me draft some cover letters in Swedish. Even with all the mandatory personality tweaks and prompting, it always seems to default to highly florid and self-congratulatory Americanisms if I'm not careful. It's very subtle.

I do understand where proponents of language equivalency are coming from. LLMs seem to be extremely good at answering simple, one-shot type questions and mechanical 'low-level' translations for most languages. I feel like as soon as you introduce complex chains of thought or multi-step cross-linguistic tasks, minor imperfections stack and become magnified, just as with coding tasks or context rot.

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

#155

Post by weregiraffe »

kvam wrote: post #137
weregiraffe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the gap grow? There is no more training data to acquire, frontier model are training on the entire internet. Everything from now on is just fine-tuning.

Your statement assumes training data is the only thing that matters for the big players, while not considering it limiting for the small Norwegian model. That’s a fallacy.

Nowhere in the article does it say the Norwegian LLM will train _only_ on Norwegian data.

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

#156

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

> 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.

Depends on what they are doing and why. but at most big labs, only the final model training happens on the big clusters. a lot of experimentation happens on So for fast iteration, this seems fine.

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

#157

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

could you provide evidence to suggest he is wrong?

It seems like you've made an assertion but not provided evidence. Why is it not a disadvantage to only have english LLMs?

Can you get the nuance of Norwegian history/culture with present models?

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

#158

Post by NorwegianDude »

joe_mamba wrote: post #124
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor. Which is bizarre to me Norway doesn't have a booming tech sector with all hat wealth fund acting as the biggest VC. They instead use their wealth fund to invest in US's tech sector. Baffling.

Considering the fact that the US is complaining about Norway putting too much money into the US market, imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway. It would be chaos.

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

#159

Post by NorwegianDude »

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

While Google does a good job with language support in their models, GPT-5.5 can't write proper Norwegian. It's even making up words that does not exist.

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

#160

Post by joe_mamba »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #158
joe_mamba wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor. Which is bizarre to me Norway doesn't have a booming tech sector with all hat wealth fund acting as the biggest VC. They instead use their wealth fund to invest in US's tech sector. Baffling.

Considering the fact that the US is complaining about Norway putting too much money into the US market, imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway. It would be chaos.

> imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway.

It would create jobs, sovereignty, intellectual property and soft power?

Instead it goes to strengthening the tech monopoly of a country that threatens to invade your neighbour.

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