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Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

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Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#111

Post by intended »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language." I thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

Quite true ?

English is ludicrously over abundant in training when compared to any language.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#112

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

vidarh wrote: post #63
everforward wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me deeply curious about how LLMs understand language. Do LLMs relate cognates more than words that are dissimilar in different languages? I wonder if that plays some role in the effectiveness of tokenization.

I have no idea if the similar spelling will somehow help - I used that mostly because it's a simple way if illustrating the close relationship, but I suspect you'd find that the meanings of closely related words are likely to more directly overlap. The grammar is perhaps more likely to help. Similar word order etc. Even weirdness like German - my only top grade on a German essay in school was one where I on purpose i…

The same thing works for guessing German grammar from English. The farther back you go in English, the more its grammar resembles German.

"What sayest thou?" -> "Was sagst du?"

In fact, for the above, you don't even have to know a single German word. You just have to know what for question words, "wh" -> "w", that the English "y" at the end of a syllable usually comes from an older Germanic "g" sound, and that "th" was replaced by "d" in German. That gets you 90% of the way from early modern English to modern German in the above example.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#113

Post by Epa095 »

elygre wrote: post #100
sgt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm that. Norway may have a small population, but if you live there you'll think it's truly the center of the world (aside from the US. Norwegians love America)

Love America? Yes, we did.

It is, after all, a God which turned out not to be a God, but just America.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#114

Post by vintermann »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
WatchDog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

Yeah, was about to comment that too, instead of training a new model and new weights exclusively for Norwegian (and expecting/wanting every other small/medium-sized country to do the same) which seems infinity harder, they could have made high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English, and making it all public. I guess there still would be a worry that i…

Copyrights and statutes don't allow them to do that. The mandate of the National Library maybe permits them to make an LLM through (though I won't at all be surprised if someone sues them anyway).

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#115

Post by vintermann »

amarant wrote: post #74
KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

How true is this statement: "He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language." I thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the langu…

Not remotely true in my estimation. I don't really speak Norwegian, but I do speak Swedish(which means I mostly understand Norwegian as they're very similar). Every model I've tried speaking Swedish to does it perfectly. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for Norwegian already

Does that include local distilled models? Because it didn't last time I checked for Norwegian.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#116

Post by vintermann »

TrackerFF wrote: post #14

I'm a Norwegian, and I use the national library almost every day for searching through texts. They have truly one of the best working user interfaces (and functionality) for searching through the massive amounts of text.

Well... You realize how used you are to the basic stemming and spelling flexibility which every search engine has had since Altavista.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#117

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

vidarh wrote: post #47
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're only good at it because they were trained on massive amounts of English and French data.

Not really true. Both Claude and ChatGPT can translate into minor dialects of Norwegian they will have seen very few works in because very few printed works exist in them. E.g. I've tested both my local spoken dialect, which is rarely written, and a sociolect used by a 1970's Maoist group consiting of a few hundred people, where most of the printed material consists of novels from a couple of ex-members that became a…

This is all true, but I assumed the original posters were talking about cultural knowledge, not linguistic correspondences.

To do translation well you still need cultural knowledge. (E.g. the particular modes of specific kinds of legalese, or slang and the nuances of social class, etc)

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#118

Post by isawczuk »

rafram wrote: post #86

> Marius Husnes, the Head of IT Platform at the library (Nasjonlbiblioteket) discussed the project at Huawei’s ID Forum 2026 in Paris, saying that no commercial LLM provider was developing a local (Norwegian) language LLM. He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about…

Poland have its one LLM called Bielik. It's not only better in preserving Polish sounding wording, it's also better in writing government documents. Why better? They did arena and statistically it's just better.

Re: Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

#120

Post by 6510 »

What is called culture here will increasingly be propaganda. It reminds me of people cheering twitter as a replacement of RSS or using facebook to communicate with your customers rather than email. You won't know which will be the winning company, don't know who might control it in the future and we cant predict what it will cost. It doesn't take much to be very annoying.
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