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GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

tno.nl

51–60 of 325 posts

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

#51
post #34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".

Sure. At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud. With AI, it is even more strategic.

My impression is that in Europe much fewer people are convinced that AI-maxxing is necessary or even a net benefit.

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

#52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud. With AI, it is even more strategic.

Which has nothing to do with VCs, just with sourcing decisions.

If there were European MicroSoft or Google, there would be a preference.

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

#53
post #51
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud. With AI, it is even more strategic.

My impression is that in Europe much fewer people are convinced that AI-maxxing is necessary or even a net benefit.

And if you ask a bit more, you'll find that those same people are very likely to daily-drive AI models, desktop and phone operating systems and various other software critical to their professional and personal lives from US companies. And buy tons of Chinese products over Chinese or US e-commerce platforms.

What people say matters much less than what they do.

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

#54
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I thought finetuning data can't contradict foundation models, and anything that are inconsistent with the standard LLM American-Chinese split personality would be rejected?

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

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They could apply the Polder Model of consensus decision making with a mixture of experts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model

Funny, that's what I thought when PewDiePie set up his monster AI rig and what he called a 'council'. Quote:

"PewDiePie has built a custom web UI for self-hosting AI models called "ChatOS" that runs on his custom PC with 2x RTX 4000 Ada cards, along with 8x modded RTX 4090s with 48 GB of VRAM. Running open-source models from Baidu and OpenAI, PewDiePie made a "council" of bots that voted on the best responses, and then built "The Swarm" for data collection that will become the foundation of his own model coming next month."

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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

#57
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?

Really? Because I'm pretty sure that at least every two days there's a active post with a top voted comment along the lines of "The EU isn't doing AI themselves, they are so hosed".

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

#58
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of ASML? NXP? Ignorant comment

Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make? ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically. And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric part…

The World's Most Important Machine ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 photo…

Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.

> If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.

I'm skeptical that high taxes is a large reason to lose to California of all places. Maybe in some important sense CA has "earned" that via talent and funding density while NL hasn't (from the perspective of a company, to be clear)

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

#60
I wonder with these stories. Why are there so many individual country efforts? We know the scale needed with scaling laws / capital / energy. Most of these countries alone can barely compete (even large groups of them would struggle.

Why don't they work together on it? Companies like Airbus have already been able to do that with aircraft.

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