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GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

tno.nl

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

#231
post #170
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.

You missed the part where they got 13 million EUR , 3 years ago! and dont have a release yet....Definitely doing it at European pace...they will have release two when AGI is around...

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

#232

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?

I'm from Spain and I also hate these projects with passion. Creating models that speak multiple languages is a solved problem. Having each European Nation train its own useless "sovereign model" in its own language is a total waste of time and resources when we could pool resources and give it a try to training SOTA models that speak in all European languages.

I'd rather have smaller european labs try to give it a go at distributed training. If multiple countries got together and said, "look, we tried training a distributed model that speaks in all of our local languages and that is comparable to 1-year-old Chinese open-source models", that, at least, I would find interesting.

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

#233
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…

This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government weaponizing its leading tech firms reach into the EU for nationalistic purposes. The EU was build on the principles of collaboration, to overcome the nationalistic impulses. Free trade and free movement of people, no need for everyone to replicate what everyone else is doing. Preventing individual nation states from favor…

>This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government weaponizing its leading tech firms reach into the EU for nationalistic purposes.

And in response NL should weaponize ASML for example. Then both sides would naturally back down. Specialization is the most efficient way of developing tech civilization.

Whereis everybody building their own mediocre versions would be repeating Russia in its attempt to make its own national messenger - a lot of government money sunk, yet people are still using Telegram/etc.

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

#234
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?

To be fair. There is a security concern angle: even open-source models could be trained as sleeper agents that act adversarially (for example, adding backdoors) when used in specific national companies in specific settings. This is very difficult to detect or void, so if you want to be sure 100% that this isn't the case, you have to train your own model from scratch.

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

#235

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…

This already exists https://eurollm.io/ How do people not know about it and keep making stuff from scratch?

I did not know about EuroLLM. I had a look to the paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05879) describing it:

Specifically, we discard documents shorter than 200 characters (Xue et al., 2021a), and any page containing the phrase “lorem ipsum,” the word “javascript,” or curly brackets (Raffel et al., 2023)....

It is quite surprising/funny to see all documents with javascript removed.

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

#236
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government weaponizing its leading tech firms reach into the EU for nationalistic purposes. The EU was build on the principles of collaboration, to overcome the nationalistic impulses. Free trade and free movement of people, no need for everyone to replicate what everyone else is doing. Preventing individual nation states from favor…

>This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government weaponizing its leading tech firms reach into the EU for nationalistic purposes. And in response NL should weaponize ASML for example. Then both sides would naturally back down. Specialization is the most efficient way of developing tech civilization. Whereis everybody building their own mediocre versions would be repeat…

ASML wiki for those like me who were confused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML

(despite the name, i am not dutch)

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

#237
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…

There is something to be said for this "most cheapest" approach, there is also something to be said for making models that are entirely ethically sourced: 1. Free of controversy like unlicensed training materials 2. Free of exploitative rlfh loops by people in low-wages countries 3. The leasons learned (and published) from going through the entire training process on "European" hardware: "AI factories" (the term for…

one would also hope there'll be less pressure to "make line go up", i.e. not having to do attention-engineering via deliberate sycophancy to trap individuals into using it more and more and more and more and more and more.

but in general, yes, as someone who is vehemently anti-ai GPT-NL has piqued my interest specifically because of the ethical protections / measures they're talking about. question is whether they stick to it.

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

#238
post #167

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…

if something’s strategically important for safety it’s wise to have competency in it.

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

#239
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s good that the USA has so much influence due to their dominance in information technology. It was only nominally democratic, now it’s a total shit show.

> total shit show Are there people legitimately brain-rotted such that they believe stuff like this? Outside of the constant flow of "hey guys, look at the latest dumb thing Trump did" coming from entertainment outfits posing as news, what are we even talking about? Life goes on as normal for the Americans. You are way too online.

Yes, the current administration has been in power for less than two years so obviously the “day to day life” hasn’t changed much for the average American (except everything has gotten more expensive).

The US is no longer looked at as a superpower, it just surrendered to a regional power and will pay $300B USD in tribute.

But for Trump and his cronies life certainly has improved.

But the damage is done and we are witnessing the decline and destruction of the worlds greatest Empire of all time.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 Times As Many Europeans Move to the US, than the Other Way Around. [1]: https://mises.org/mises-wire/3-times-many-europeans-move-us-...

In 2017. Wonder what it's like today.

"US, for 1st time in 50 years, experienced negative net migration in 2025" [0]

Curious how they jumped for nearly decade old stats, huh?

[0] https://abcnews.com/US/us-1st-time-50-years-experienced-nega...

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