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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

#151

Post by matheusmoreira »

mediaman wrote: post #148
matheusmoreira wrote: post #56

So good to see these developments. Every country should do this. I'd even say every person should gave their own personalized AI running on their own computers. If only the costs involved were not so astronomical.

Why? That doesn't make any sense. The government would be far better off figuring out how to take commodity models and applying them to government functions where they can, with deterministic scaffolding and guardrails, to make government more efficient, optionally using RL on traces from their use to improve their performance. Imagine taking models and fine-tuning them / doing RL rollouts to help automate permit app…

> Why?

Because then the USA can't just turn it off.

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

#152

Post by keynha »

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]

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

#153

Post by appplication »

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…

Disagree, it’s in the country’s best interest to facilitate internal expertise on the full stack and own their “supply chain” so to speak and fight brain drain. The outcome isn’t just the model, it’s the expertise. Otherwise all their smartest folks will depart for countries where LLM development is strongest.

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

#154

Post by dmix »

RetroTechie wrote: post #132
throw-the-towel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EU chips act was already largely a failure and they threw plenty of money at it. The problem with the Europe is they look to their bureaucrats to stimulate things then expect different results from the last 50 times.

Europe needs its own private industry that attracts talent and capital. It doesn’t need another EU press release talking about hopes and dreams

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

#155

Post by vr46 »

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?

Maybe the Dutch really really want an LLM that tells them the truth as straight as possible no matter how harsh - that might be tricky

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

#156

Post by khafra »

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…

Today, you keep seeing "sovereign" LMs that are subject to the sovereignty of some human-led state. Tomorrow, the "sovereign" LMs will be called that for a completely different reason.

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

#157

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by sinuhe69 »

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.

This platform is running from the US and frequently accessed by US people. What else would you expect?

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

#159

Post by edg5000 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #149
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…

It really doesn't matter if the model sucks and doesn't perform well. Given the funding amount and their lofty ambitions, it seems very unlikely they will be able to pull it off properly. Yeah China and US models have baises but so will any model. The biases do not get in the way of the product though. You don't open those models just to ask for what happened in Taianaman square or if Taiwan is a state. You dont ask…

> no matter how "ethically sourced" a colonizer-based entity like Europe made it

The attempt is laughable, buy every country should at least try to keep up with frontier technology, even if they fail massively or are massively underfunded.

On the other hand, it's arguably wasteful for an incompetent govt to do something like this, since the money will almost certainly not be well spent. It will just go to people good with MS Word. That's the likely failure mode for such NL innovation projects. The actual solution is a culture shift, but that is much harder if not impossible to pull off and requires decades. But we (NL people and govt) should work towards that. Most likely all these govt led innovation attempts are a sad waste of tax money.

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

#160

Post by edg5000 »

mediaman wrote: post #148
matheusmoreira wrote: post #56

So good to see these developments. Every country should do this. I'd even say every person should gave their own personalized AI running on their own computers. If only the costs involved were not so astronomical.

Why? That doesn't make any sense. The government would be far better off figuring out how to take commodity models and applying them to government functions where they can, with deterministic scaffolding and guardrails, to make government more efficient, optionally using RL on traces from their use to improve their performance. Imagine taking models and fine-tuning them / doing RL rollouts to help automate permit app…

Another thing they could do is try to attack the the suppply chain issues. Try to form an alliance to block RAM deals or something, or to get fabs on EU soil, making HBM for the people. We have some bargaining chips, especially when banding together with a few large EU states. Not as EU, just a few specic countries. No bureaucracy, just elite trade diplimacy. Probably best done in secret so the big labs don't catch wind of this. Any NL/DE/UK/FR/CH/PL/IT govt people reading this?
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