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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

#191

Post by ltrg »

bradhe wrote: post #167
appplication wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources. This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man. On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. I…

> This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man.

It’s a response to the actually-nationalist practice of the United States. I can understand why it might feel different from California, but things are a bit scary over here right now.

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

#193

Post by colordrops »

Gud wrote: post #170
bradhe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources. This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man. On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. I…

Why would it have to be mediocre? Both Netherlands and Sweden produce highly competent researchers. Per capita on par with any other location on the planet, including California. This will be good for Europe as a whole and also the planet.

Sure, but there is still a more dense talent pool with SV companies, and training frontier models requires massive amounts of capital. Are Netherlands and Sweden prepared to invest 10s of billions?

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

#194

Post by jeroenhd »

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?

There's an absolutely massive cultural and behavioural bias in those models. Models will suggest things like "go to the hospital" for things that require GP appointments, "just drive three hours" while it's faster to go places by train, and so on. They will do it in anglicised Dutch (compound words split, English-like grammar structures) that's perfectly understandable, but the cultural bias is there if you know to look for it.

Furthermore, the expertise in designing and training these models is valuable as well. The existing models are good as a starting point in terms of learning from previous mistakes, but we should not just let a handful of American and Chinese people keep the knowledge and expertise.

One problem with this particular project, though, is that copyright has been enforced for Dutch LLM training before, and the AI industry cannot exist without massive scale piracy, the likes of which has never been seen before. A lot of Dutch training material exists in pirated books that AI companies in countries that do not care about copyright have access to, but are exempted from the training set here. The impact of enforcing copyright on an AI model will be quite interesting to see.

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

#195

Post by Gud »

colordrops wrote: post #193
Gud wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it have to be mediocre? Both Netherlands and Sweden produce highly competent researchers. Per capita on par with any other location on the planet, including California. This will be good for Europe as a whole and also the planet.

Sure, but there is still a more dense talent pool with SV companies, and training frontier models requires massive amounts of capital. Are Netherlands and Sweden prepared to invest 10s of billions?

Honestly I have a strong suspicion that “the talent pool” will shift towards Europe and China and I believe it’s already happening.

And yes, I do believe Europe will invest in this technology.

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

#197

Post by yanis_t »

WarmWash wrote: post #111

If Europe is serious about getting home grown AI fast, three simple steps: 1. Huge tax incentives, let the companies get grossly wealthy while paying minimal taxes. Minimum 10 years with clauses protecting "retribution" taxes there after. 2. Tax incentives for the founders/shareholders, just like above. 3. Drop worker protections to a minimum, make it easy to fire people. You only want serious/dedicated employees any…

Exactly this. You can't have a competitive industry while at the same time heavily redistributing wealth to the point where people don't have any incentives at all.

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

#198

Post by vitalyan123 »

Gud wrote: post #170
bradhe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources. This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man. On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. I…

Why would it have to be mediocre? Both Netherlands and Sweden produce highly competent researchers. Per capita on par with any other location on the planet, including California. This will be good for Europe as a whole and also the planet.

>and also the planet.

What a glorious day for Canada and, therefore, the world.

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

#199

Post by vrganj »

joe_mamba wrote: post #35
dwa3592 wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

Anyone who uses quotation marks around far right has clearly stated their allegiance.

It is no wonder then that such a person would do their best to poo-poo the worlds most successful peace project and the bastion of rule of law.

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

#200

Post by throw310822 »

bigfudge wrote: post #183
throw310822 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some examples of these use cases?

Support bots and question answering with access to sensitive pii?

Yes, but what's the point of a support bot that writes good Dutch when it can't follow instructions, doesn't understand the questions or can't solve problems? I might be wrong, but I don't think atm these models have the cognitive ability to perform any task in a satisfactory manner.

As for accessing pii, I imagine the value here is in the fact they're local, which has nothing to do with the "sovereignty" of these models. If anything, a model is more likely to be tricked by a malicious prompt the farther it is from the sota.

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