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GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

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Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#13
post #9

This is not an open source model. In that sense I think the sovereign claim is a bit strange. It's the data providers that determine access to the model.

So it's a model that's sovereign as in sovereign kingdom of the Netherlands vs sovereign for the people's?

"sovereign" the marketing term basically means "in-house" now, where "house" depends on who says it.

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#14

Interesting that this got posted now: the project is receiving increasingly more skepticism lately in the Dutch tech scene [0], and I think that’s fully justified. [0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...

What is the exact skepticism? The only thing I could get from that was from some "tech entrepreneur":

> GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.”

That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to start with something, then ramp up, rather do what only a select few labs been able to do, start with really big models. Especially if you're resource constrained, which since this is a government project, I really hope for the sake of the tax payers it was.

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#15
I really think countries should build a sovereign _ecosystem_ and sovereign models are an excuse to achieve it.

An ecosystem is the tribal knowledge, revolving door of talent, known processes etc.

If the end goal is to make a half assed Dutch speaking model, I think it won’t cut it. I don’t see anyone using it over Gemma 4b that runs on my laptop.

An ecosystem is more durable and has desirable second order effects.

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#16
I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there.

Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running.

What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#17

Interesting that this got posted now: the project is receiving increasingly more skepticism lately in the Dutch tech scene [0], and I think that’s fully justified. [0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...

What is the exact skepticism? The only thing I could get from that was from some "tech entrepreneur": > GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.” That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to sta…

I mean if you are wasting funds kind of knowing it's nowhere near remote competitive, then it's kind of a fraud.

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#18
post #16

I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there. Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running. What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?

It is not about the country but the language. Most llms have poor or no support for Dutch.

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#19
post #16

I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there. Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running. What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?

[flagged]

Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

#20
post #16

I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there. Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running. What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?

Why should Dutch people be expected to make do with models 99% trained on American/Chinese cultural context and language?
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