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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

#111

Post by WarmWash »

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 anyway.

Within 2-3 years there will be at least a trillion dollars looking to get in.

Don't worry though if reading that made you mad. Its absolutely not going to happen. I can think of few things more antithetical to the European ethos than smart skilled people working 80-100hrs weeks with almost no vacation to gas their founders net worth by tens, hundreds, of billions.

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

#112

Post by siva7 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #110
siva7 wrote: 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.

You don't wanna find out how fast american troops would land there..

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by TJSomething »

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…

If open frontier models start closing up and states start more export controls on AI services and hardware, it might be good to ensure the supply chain is there to reproduce the SotA, or even a couple generations behind it.

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

#115

Post by numpad0 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #83
numpad0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought finetuning data can't contradict foundation models, and anything that are inconsistent with the standard LLM American-Chinese split personality would be rejected?

Fine tuning happens on top of pretraining, so of course it can "forget" pretrained defaults when warranted by the new data it's being fine tuned on.

But you have to have more data than used for pretraining for the added knowledge to take precedent over pretraining, no? If that would be the case, you practically contradict the knowledge in the base model.

I mean ... LLMs are sort of an extreme and living proof of linguistic determinism. Their behaviors are dictated almost entirely by disorganized language data, primarily English and Chinese. So you can't just add a language as native primary language in a quick post training, I think. There's no way that it would work.

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

#117

Post by siva7 »

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…

Uh, some would say it's easy to determine what input went into the training for kimi and qwen.. since they were caught stealing it from American labs. Some cultural cliches may never change.

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

conradkay wrote: post #59
vovavili wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.

> If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology. I'm skeptical that high taxes is a large reason to lose to California of all places. Maybe in some important sense CA has "earned" that via talent and funding density while NL hasn't (from the perspective of a company, to be clear)

[deleted]

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

#120

Post by rmccue »

jbverschoor wrote: post #110
siva7 wrote: 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.

ASML’s EUV technology is partially based on US research and so Congress has a degree of control over it, so it’s not that simple: https://web.archive.org/web/20230116222847/https://www.nytim...
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