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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

#21

Post by stared »

I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race.

Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.

Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546

So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.

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

#22

Post by embedding-shape »

barrenko wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why is "competing against remote SOTA models on quality" the only thing that matters here?

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

#23

Post by ews »

stared wrote: post #21

I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race. Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects. Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regu…

Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.

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

#24

Post by InsideOutSanta »

barrenko wrote: post #17
embedding-shape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Targeting a niche audience with specific requirements is not fraud.

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

#25

Post by dwa3592 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #20
dwa3592 wrote: 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?

Understood, but they could fine tune base models on their own cultural context and language. Why reinventing the wheel?

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

#26

Post by barrenko »

embedding-shape wrote: post #22
barrenko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why is "competing against remote SOTA models on quality" the only thing that matters here?

What the hell else is there? All the other stuff can be done by an intern with an 8 euro HF Pro subscription.

Other than actual research, which is in a different camp.

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

#27

Post by dwa3592 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #19
dwa3592 wrote: 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]

>>Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware,

Well, then this is will be a good start.

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

#28

Post by joe_mamba »

ews wrote: post #23
stared wrote: post #21

I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race. Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects. Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regu…

Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.

>It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem

What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photos.

Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined

Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.

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

#29

Post by tgv »

Achterlangs wrote: post #18
dwa3592 wrote: 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.

Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.

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

#30

Post by davedx »

joe_mamba wrote: post #19
dwa3592 wrote: 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]

Have you heard of ASML? NXP?

Ignorant comment

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