281–290 of 325 posts
I think at this point what the Netherlands, and any other country that wants a good model in their language should do, is gather up every piece of text ever written in that language and license it to the big AI labs/companies for training. I'm sure there are vast libraries of books and other text that haven't been digitized and aren't a priority for the big labs.
Also, when training models, you create talent that then could go to other countries (brain drain). Restricting that brain drain without imposing authoritarian restrictions on the movements of people seems hard, so it seems hard to keep talent as a competitive advantage. If instead the competitive advantage is datacenters with chips, power capacity building, fast path to building datacenters, I think they are easier to retain while preserving the rights of everyone involved.
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.
I was somewhat excited about these "sovereign" open models in the beginning, but it became soon apparent that they're not gonna be anything but toys compared to SOTA. The problem is that there are a lot, at least 30, of these small projects scattered around, funded for a few years as some ad-hoc temporary coalition of universities and businesses. Those simply cannot compete with businesses spending tens of billions o…
I think at this point what the Netherlands, and any other country that wants a good model in their language should do, is gather up every piece of text ever written in that language and license it to the big AI labs/companies for training. I'm sure there are vast libraries of books and other text that haven't been digitized and aren't a priority for the big labs.
Yeah except replace "license it to the companies for training" with "pay the companies to train on it"
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 ... The EU was build on the principles of collaboration ... But this only works if it is reciprocal. This sounds great but doesn't really make any sense. What skeptics are saying is there should be a pan-EU effort to build frontier models, rather than one-off toy models built by each country as a box-ticking exercise. "We…
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…
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…
Let's not overstate the case. The EU was built to keep France and Germany from getting into another war, and it has been successful at that. All the other "principles" are just window dressing.
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.
Maybe I'm more attuned to this type of thing having grown up as a national of a smaller state living in the shadow of a bigger state but you constantly see actors from the bigger state belittling and condescending anything contributed socially or economically from the smaller state.
And I see this sort of dynamic here in this forum where Americans very frequently talk condescendingly like this about Europe generally and European tech especially (they did it to China too but China smartly ignored this self-interested nonsense and carried on anyway which is what Europeans should do).
It really grates on me and presumably many others. But it serves an agenda too of a lot of the founders and financiers that hang out here that have big fat customers in Europe they'd like to keep sweet and competitors they'd like to keep down.
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They could apply the Polder Model of consensus decision making with a mixture of experts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
Funny, that's what I thought when PewDiePie set up his monster AI rig and what he called a 'council'. Quote: "PewDiePie has built a custom web UI for self-hosting AI models called "ChatOS" that runs on his custom PC with 2x RTX 4000 Ada cards, along with 8x modded RTX 4090s with 48 GB of VRAM. Running open-source models from Baidu and OpenAI, PewDiePie made a "council" of bots that voted on the best responses, and th…
Yet another attention craving influencer who shilled crypto scams during the crypto bubble and is now marketing "AI councils" during the AI bubble.
He's not a serious or honest person, AI is just what he pivoted to after crypto. That's not innovation; it's attaching trendy branding to ideas that were already old when Marvin Minsky wrote The Society of Mind in 1986, three years before PewDiePie was zero years old in 1989.
The only thing PewDiePie's brought to the table is cleverly optimized YouTube thumbnails designed to attract clicks. The architecture is decades old; only his marketing and shilling is state of the art.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This "vaguely nationalistic world view around tech" is a direct consequence of the US government ... The EU was build on the principles of collaboration ... But this only works if it is reciprocal. This sounds great but doesn't really make any sense. What skeptics are saying is there should be a pan-EU effort to build frontier models, rather than one-off toy models built by each country as a box-ticking exercise. "We…
Look I agree with all you said. The EU should do this but the EU is also structurally bad at large concerted efforts exactly because it is a collaboration mechanism, not a super state.
If an individual country trains a language model, it's not ambitious enough. If we try to do one for the whole EU they will say it takes too long (you need to get all countries on board, you see). If the EU announces it by executive decision it's a dictatorship and government driven economic intervention, if a EU company does it they'll say it's not good enough.
You can't win with these people. In my opinion, you shouldn't even try to convince them.