How about fixing whatever the hell prevents competitive private LLM vendors from appearing in Europe?
GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
171–180 of 325 posts
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
TNO literally stands for "Dutch Organisation for Applied Scientific Research" (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk).
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#173It 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…
At least with social networks the network effect is a powerful force. Foregrounding regulatory burden in that context is nonsensical. (That does not apply in the same way to models.)
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#174How about fixing whatever the hell prevents competitive private LLM vendors from appearing in Europe?
They’re still debating that, they’ll get back to us soon I’m sure.
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#175I 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…
Their legality is very questionable given all the likely copyright infringement going on, and a state can't really ignore that.
States are the things which can ignore that, and I'm pretty sure US and China already do. No state is going to respect copyright if they think its future is at stake, and apparently even Netherlands thinks the future is at stake.
(Of course states can ignore copyright in a legally polite manner, such as asserting that training on all published material in the National Library is fair game)
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, Well, then this is will be a good start.
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…
And yet, the ESMC Dresden fab is getting built. And now there's a Chips Act 2.0.
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#177How about fixing whatever the hell prevents competitive private LLM vendors from appearing in Europe?
you mean getting rid of checks and balances, environment protection laws, anti-corruption laws?
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#178Burning tax money. I dare to bet this will never lead anywhere.
"Burning" €13.5M of public funds. That's 4000 times less than the Cursor deal from a couple days ago.
I was actually surprised by how little it was.
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#179Earlier 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.
I have rather deep concerns about our future with AI.
Yet, I'm still sending hundreds of dollars to US companies providing it. I'd much rather send it to EU companies.
Re: GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The culture shift that has generated this is the same one that causes the other story on HN this morning about xAIs gas generators being a national security issue. Ie one towards corruption graft and the public ill.
I don’t want Europe to model itself on the US, whatever the economic gain. Hopefully we are large enough to find a third way between China and the US.