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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

#131

Post by throw310822 »

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.

I don't understand this. Even if that were true (and it isn't in my experience), a model that is trained on a Dutch corpus and arguably "knows Dutch well" but has the reasoning and comprehension abilities of a three year old is useless in any case. I'd rather use a model that can only speak English and put an automatic translator around it.

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

#132

Post by RetroTechie »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #79
joe_mamba wrote: post #28

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…

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 t…

> It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.

It's not gone, it just needs to be re-discovered. And the bureaucrats need to flash some € then get out of the way.

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

#133

Post by throw310822 »

dvdkon wrote: post #90
tgv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There would be a bunch of value in having, say, a good 30B-class model that used my local language as well as it does English. There's lots of cases, especially in the government sphere, where local processing is a requirement and frontier-level capabilities aren't required. Making those cheap to run seems like a fine goal.

Can you provide some examples of these use cases?

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

#134

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

dwa3592 wrote: post #39
joe_mamba wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>ASML only makes the lithography machines Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.

Funnily ASML owes its current success partly to US funded research (straight from Wikipedia):

> Two years later, it joined a consortium, which included Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.[12]

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

#135

Post by rapidfl »

zozbot234 wrote: post #81
thevinter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You keep building on the last available version? Fine tuning is a whole lot cheaper, easier and more useful than pretraining a model from scratch. It's a complete no brainer.

> You keep building on the last available version?

yes but a sovereign can allocate some resources and a few people to stay in the loop from a first principles level. No need to wait for a rug pull.

Of course, it can not compete with the frontier labs. But good to have researchers and professors "in-house". LLMs are here for the long-term.

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

#136

Post by jdw64 »

Honestly, I used to think the 'sovereign model' was a waste of money. But recently, with the US logic of restricting model exports, I've come to think that if things go south, they could even cut off allied nations. So now the sovereign model seems reasonable to me. That, in turn, means US influence is deteriorating. And that probably isn't such great news for American businesses.

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

#138

Post by Lucasoato »

transcriptase wrote: post #99
sublimefire wrote: post #69

It is crazy that anything Europe gets so much hate. IMO it is important to build models within the boundaries of smaller nations, using their own language. Research has to continue even if it is outside of US and China.

It’s not that it gets hate so much as it’s akin to watching them make announcements that they’re going to make a European google/facebook/tiktok. Sure… they can, except at the end of the day it’s a bit late, regulatory burden will make it comparatively useless, and because of that nobody will ever use it. It will be spending a bunch of taxpayer dollars for press releases. The running joke is that when these “sovereig…

I kinda agree, the best use of taxpayer money should be in reducing taxes to corporation that would like to compete in the market vs US and China, rather than making governments playing the game (since they very obviously can’t).

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

#139

Post by ignoramous »

siva7 wrote: post #117
mschuster91 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kimi and Qwen come out of China, which means that their training material may be biased e.g. relating to Taiwan [1]. In addition, there is no way to determine what input went into the training, if it was properly licensed, if it was legal (e.g. not contaminated by CSAM), or how the human component of RLHF was sourced - in US models, for example, stories about exploitation like [2] have been floating for years. Assumi…

Uh, some would say it's easy to determine what input went into the training for kimi and qwen.. since they were caught stealing it from American labs. Some cultural cliches may never change.

> since they were caught stealing it from American labs. Some cultural cliches may never change.

Has a formal lawsuit been brought to bear? Given, Anthropic & OpenAI are being dragged through courts for copyright violation (or stealing, as you'd call it, if the companies involved were culturally Chinese) by newspapers, publishing houses etc; one'd think they'd pass on some of that medicine to Alibaba, which does have business entities registered in the US.

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

#140

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

jbverschoor wrote: post #110
siva7 wrote: post #106

> GPT‑NL is developed within the Netherlands and Europe. This gives us full control over the model, the data and the choices we make. We avoid dependency on non‑European providers and invest in a sustainable AI ecosystem aligned with our laws, values and societal goals. I love it! So this is our answer to America and China denying foreigners access to their frontier models.. a massive 13,5M€ founding to develop souve…

NL could simply say: no more ASML machines, and no more ASM wafers.

Any move like this would be simply by murdering the golden goose. ASMLs stuff is good no doubt but you don’t want to give the world the incentive to develop an alternative. If it was done once it can be done again and once it has been done again say good bye to all those returns on monopoly.
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