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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

#71

Post by eightysixfour »

sarjann wrote: post #62
eightysixfour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll play devil's advocate a little bit - I'm not sure it is losing its "independence" by not taking part in the race. It could very well be that it is gaining independence from tech and choosing a "second mover advantage" to decide how it gets deployed after seeing how it impacts everyone else. Let the US and China experiment on the bleeding edge (and their citizens feel the effect, both good and bad), and then be p…

The problem is recursive self improvement creating a very difficult gap and the fact that power, compute has a lag from when you invest and when data centers come up. You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.

These things are true, however:

1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now.

2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't work with Europe"?

There's a whole bunch of grey in between the two, for example only having access to second rate models, but I'm not sure that particularly matters if the strategy is "second mover."

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

#73

Post by thevinter »

armcat wrote: post #70

I keep seeing these "sovereign" LMs time and time again. In Sweden we had GPT-SW3 ( https://www.ai.se/en/project/gpt-sw3 ) and same story there. Instead of burning money on "sovereign" claims, national research labs should instead focus on building on top of solid baselines (like Qwen/Kimi) and finetuning frontier models with real agentic utility that can be applied across actual use cases and can be widely used by i…

And what happens once the "solid baselines" become unavailable for a reason or the other?

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

#75

Post by guywithahat »

creesch wrote: post #31
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…

> 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".

> There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy

What a wild statement, VC's are behind most of the growth in the US economy, and they directly drive up wages in tech. I'd be fascinated to hear a valid complaint of VC's that isn't just money envy

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

#76

Post by guywithahat »

king_phil wrote: post #44
stared wrote: 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.

Well those companies exist because of VC's, and the nation's business freedom compared to Europe

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

#79

Post by throw-the-towel »

joe_mamba wrote: post #28
ews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 photo…

Frankly, being Russian myself, I'm also very disappointed by the state of tech in Europe.

But you know what hurts the most? That I know it wasn't always that way.

I'm sitting right now in the same country that invented the Minitel, built out the TGV network and the Grands Projets, and don't even get me started about the weird and wonderful machines they've got in that museum in Mulhouse, hell, you could go back in time to Gustave Eiffel. Industry and ambition used to be here. It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.

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

#80

Post by nazgul17 »

ks2048 wrote: post #66
joe_mamba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU bureaucrats are too busy trying to keep the welfare/pension system from collapsing, defeating Russia, supporting Ukraine, managing the fossil fuels energy shortages, figuring out how to nerf Chinese EVs while supporting domestic car companies, and restricting social media free speech to make sure the "far right" don't win elections. So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priorit…

How many in that list of things is the US also doing?

The US is a single country. Russia is not on the US' doorstep. The US has its own oil. The US prints the world reserve currency.
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