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GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

tno.nl

101–110 of 325 posts

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

#101
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is recursive self improvement creating a very difficult gap and the fact that power, compute has a lag from when you invest and when data centers come up. You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.

These things are true, however: 1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now. 2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't wor…

I mean, it might listen to him. We have no clue, which is the problem.

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

#102
post #21

I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race. Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects. Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regu…

> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects. My ex-neighbor (when I was a teenager, living in Belgium) and very good friend really wanted to make it big. He became a chip engineer, moved to California, raised money for a first startup (it tanked) then raised money for a second startup. He made the world a better place (he creat…

Europe is a great place to live if you just want to float through life.

The US is a great place to live if you have talent, want to work, and want to reap the rewards.

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

#103
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…

And what happens once the "solid baselines" become unavailable for a reason or the other?

[deleted]

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

#104

What are they going to train with 13.5M really? We're a tiny company in Amsterdam in Holland and we've got "only 64x B300 to train on" so we could never make an LLM I thought, since we've got only 4M in compute. And they're going to train an LLM with all kinds of extra difficulties compared to OpenAI for just 13.5M? The very first Llama was 16M for one training.

Prices for training have dropped immensely in terms of research required, code efficiency, algorithmic/sample efficiency, and possibly also hardware (I'm not qualified to say without looking it FLOPS/dollar, or even to be certain that's the right metric here).

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

#105
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make? ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically. And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric part…

>>ASML only makes the lithography machines Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.

Why are you acting childish and petty? I said EU hasn't got AI compute manufacturing(aka no equivalent IP to Nvidia and AMD and no equivalent to TSMC or Samsung fabs), not that it doesn't have lithography machines manufacturing.

Surely you understand that while you can have the latter, you can also lack the former.

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

#106
> GPT‑NL is developed within the Netherlands and Europe. This gives us full control over the model, the data and the choices we make. We avoid dependency on non‑European providers and invest in a sustainable AI ecosystem aligned with our laws, values and societal goals.

I love it! So this is our answer to America and China denying foreigners access to their frontier models.. a massive 13,5M€ founding to develop souvereign european ai, trained exclusively on legally obtained documents and highest moral standards as defined in EU AI Act.

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

#107
post #106

> GPT‑NL is developed within the Netherlands and Europe. This gives us full control over the model, the data and the choices we make. We avoid dependency on non‑European providers and invest in a sustainable AI ecosystem aligned with our laws, values and societal goals. I love it! So this is our answer to America and China denying foreigners access to their frontier models.. a massive 13,5M€ founding to develop souve…

[deleted]

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

#108
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things are true, however: 1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now. 2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't wor…

I mean, it might listen to him. We have no clue, which is the problem.

Sure, but my guess is for "true" super intelligence we won't be able to predict whether that is true or not until it happens. I'm not a doomer, but I also don't really think we can "align" people, much less a "super intelligent" AI.

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

#109
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many in that list of things is the US also doing?

Different scale for those problems. Way different scale. US is monetary rich, oil rich, energy rich, manufacturing rich, and doesn't suffer from russian aggression at its borders. US is so bored from how rich and problem free it is compared to Europe, that it can afford to keep starting foreign wars as if nothing ever happens.

Also back on the topic, the US managed to bring TSMC to open a cutting edge fab in the US and has already been operational for a while. Which already puts it way ahead of the EU on this front as well.

The thing is, US is much better on actually making things happen when push comes to shove. It saw it's deficient and vulnerable on domestic semiconductor manufacturing, it then made it happen with TSMC. It's doing the same with domestic ship building with Korean partners.

US might be slow moving, but somehow EU is even way slower at realizing and addressing its vulnerabilities, only waking up when it's far too late, causing it to pay a much more painful price for sleeping at the wheel (Russian invaded Ukraine in 2014 BTW, not in 2022, and they were building another gas pipeline with them), and when this type of own-goaling keeps repeating enough times you see the correlation with EU's decline as their economic rivals keep biting more and more market share from their industries as they sleep on critical changes and developments.

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

#110
post #106

> GPT‑NL is developed within the Netherlands and Europe. This gives us full control over the model, the data and the choices we make. We avoid dependency on non‑European providers and invest in a sustainable AI ecosystem aligned with our laws, values and societal goals. I love it! So this is our answer to America and China denying foreigners access to their frontier models.. a massive 13,5M€ founding to develop souve…

NL could simply say: no more ASML machines, and no more ASM wafers.
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