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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

#121

Post by RetroTechie »

joe_mamba wrote: post #32
davedx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of ASML? NXP? Ignorant comment

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…

In a recent podcast, it was summarized as:

ASM (International) makes machines that add material to a silicon wafer (deposition).

ASML makes machines that remove material from said wafers (lithography, etching)

(I was a bit surprised that's not combined in 1 machine. But let's move on)

Then Besi makes machines to stack / interconnect / package those ICs into a package. I'm assuming pick & place machines are other companies' turf.

The above are all Dutch companies, operating a pretty important section of the tech stack.

Iirc there were (& probably still are) some IC fabs in Europe, but mostly older nodes (like useful for microcontrollers used by car manufacturers. Wikipedia has a list). So for SOTA smartphone SoCs it's off to Taiwan (TSMC), South Korea (Samsung) or China (who makes everything, including smartphones & the chips going in there).

So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check. Money? This is a rich continent.

What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".

But now the important thing: several of such initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and b) confidence that EU can do such things, is growing.

As for bureaucracy / red tape... sigh... (won't be fixed any time soon)

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

#122

Post by 14u2c »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #56

So good to see these developments. Every country should do this. I'd even say every person should gave their own personalized AI running on their own computers. If only the costs involved were not so astronomical.

Nvidia will certainly be pleased.

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

#123

Post by dr_dshiv »

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…

There is something north of 8% OCR error rates.. that will hurt model quality!

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

#124

Post by Muromec »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #20
dwa3592 wrote: 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?

Why should Dutch people be expected to make do with models 99% trained on American/Chinese cultural context and language?

Oh, it's all fine with cultural context here -- we don't even dub English language movies here because we are that cheap

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

#125

Post by flanked-evergl »

creesch wrote: post #31
stared wrote: 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. Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".

[flagged]

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

#127

Post by Muromec »

joe_mamba wrote: post #35
dwa3592 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, Well, then this is will be a good start.

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…

That's what bureaucrats are supposed to be doing BTW.

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

#128

Post by Muromec »

wrs wrote: post #10

They’re building a competitive-quality model, from scratch, with fair compensation to content owners, for €13.5 million? Something’s wrong with this picture.

Being cheap is on brand for inhabitants of the sea floor. Nothing is wrong

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

#129

Post by joe_mamba »

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)

NL is a corporate tax haven in Europe(and also compared to California), that's why almost all US and foreign companies have their corporate HQs there, Dublin or Luxembourg.

Companies go there because taxes are low for them, not necessarily for their employees(ignoring the NL 5 year tax break for foreigners). It's kinda like the US Delaware of Europe.

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

#130

Post by jbverschoor »

rmccue wrote: post #120
jbverschoor wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The US can only block exports. They cannot force exports. The NL-US relationship is quite toxic, for example the "Dutch America Friendship Treaty". Everything is very one-sided.
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