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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

#211

Post by expedition32 »

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…

Tech sovereignty is a response to American imperialism. It has not gone unnoticed that the White House has summoned the tech bros and weaponised tech.

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

#212

Post by TalkingCodeMonk »

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…

This "greed is good, and should be rewarded" philosophy is one I see all too often on HN, and the entire reason why Americas political, regulatory, and business leadership have been overrun by the countries most criminally corrupt narcissists and psychopaths; why its democracy has collapsed.

When you reward the most selfish, corrupt, and antisocial behaviours with wealth and power, you're guaranteed to create a selfish, corrupt, and antisocial society. IMHO it's indicative of what I have dubbed Americas "mental illness epidemic"; specifically cluster B personality disorders [0] which are characterised by socially-destructive and self-destructive behaviours.

If that's the world you want for you and your loved ones, congratulations. You've earned it!

[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_personality_dis...

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

#213

Post by michaelscott »

rapidfl wrote: post #135
zozbot234 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately in this game first principles requires massive resources, not "some". Building in-house on top of existing open weights is a good way to bootstrap this process, especially since there's nothing inherently magical or particularly expertise-heavy when it comes to weights themselves

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

#214

Post by kortilla »

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.

Producing local researchers isn’t enough. If you want a competitive model you need to bring the best researchers from all over the world. That means lots of investment that hasn’t been common in Europe.

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

#215

Post by jeroenhd »

layer8 wrote: post #51
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.

My impression is that in Europe much fewer people are convinced that AI-maxxing is necessary or even a net benefit.

Americans are also far less into AI than a startup forum like HN will make you believe.

In real life, there are a few AI maniacs that make their entire identity about how they use AI, but it's hardly the sensation that the internet will make you believe. I don't believe there is any difference between the USA and Europe, although the lack of employee protection does mean that it's a lot easier for Americans to lose their jobs when their managers get lured in by AI companies.

After all, the entire AI bubble is all about VCs and startups hyping each other up until profits magically appear.

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

#216

Post by SiempreViernes »

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 guess if you are strict about it, making derogatory comments like yours is indeed not hate. But I'm sure you are aware that "getting hate" frequently used in a more extensive meaning online, especially in the context of replies to a post and I don't see the much point in insisting on the stricter definition here.

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

#217

Post by SiempreViernes »

ronsor wrote: post #4
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments

Two and a half years and still not complete? That's ridiculous.

They are starting to deploy to customers now, not sure if that counts as "complete" or not. The big innovation here is that they are doing it all legally.

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

#218

Post by creesch »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #192
creesch wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, okay bud. Lets go all in on the extreme hyperboles.

I mean if morality is just personal preference why do we even allude to it at all?

Is that what I said in your mind? I honestly had to chuckle at the extreme hyperboles you decided to use. Surely having a less favorable view of hyper capitalist economics is on the same level as torture and genocide. Yup, that is a totally reasonable and measured response that just exemplifies acting in good faith.

Anyway, thanks for genuine chuckle your response got out of me.

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

#219

Post by olmo23 »

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 direct response to the MAGA / America First attitude of the American electorate.

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

#220

Post by KronisLV »

mschuster91 wrote: post #95
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…

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…

This already exists https://eurollm.io/

How do people not know about it and keep making stuff from scratch?

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