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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

#141

Post by schubidubiduba »

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

Of course they speak swedish. But often, they do not reason in Swedish and do not search in swedish. Swedish makes up a tiny fraction of training data, while the vast majority is English, from the US. Which means the answers will always have a bias towards US culture, even if you ask in Swedish and the LLM answers in Swedish.

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

#142

Post by lobochrome »

andai wrote: post #81
black_puppydog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I h…

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right? I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak). So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please." I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Ti…

Same for me - I mostly ask stuff in English but sometimes add specific terms or names in Japanese as needed. My Japanese is intermediate, but it will often switch immediately and reply only and entirely in Japanese. I'm pretty sure they have a system prompt with hairline triggers for foreign languages BECAUSE of the overrepresentation of English in the training corpora.

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

#143

Post by petterroea »

As a Norwegian I have never needed a Norwegian language model. Doing most things in Norwegian puts you at a disadvantage internationally anyways. Maybe this has value in schools, but wouldn't it just give kids more trust in relying on LLM's? My friends who work in education report that group work has become insufferable because many do not think critically and ask LLM to verify everything. I really don't see a benefit, but maybe they will find one - that is what research is for.

I am reminded that we recently concluded our experiment of forcing things to be digital on school was considered a flop. These things have a cost if we are wrong.

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

#144

Post by anal_reactor »

chvid wrote: post #101
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…

When I am chatting with ChatGPT - it is fairly obvious that it is American - its native language, its style, its attitude is American - even if we chat in Danish. Just as we cannot rely on Netflix and HBO to produce Scandinavian TV-shows even though they might do at the moment, we need to make our own stuff in this area too. And over time, the technology to do this will become cheap and readily available for us to do…

> And over time, the technology to do this will become cheap and readily available for us to do so.

But then the English models will be even better and you'll be back to square one. My guess is that things are going to become more and more American. If you assume that "culture" is a resource like "microchips", then from economic point of view it makes sense to have one country specialize in producing it, and the rest just consume. This is why when you turn on the main radio station of a random country, you're so likely to hit American music.

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

#145

Post by Telaneo »

mettamage wrote: post #133
vidarh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really fantastic. I just wished there were fewer restrictions on the content that is accessible. (a lot is only accessible from Norwegian IP addresses, so it's one of the main reasons I maintain a VPN as I'm Norwegian but live in the UK; a second set is only available from the IP addresses of libraries or research institutions - still huge amounts that are generally available, though)

Silly question but can a non-Norwegian also access it? Willing to pick up some Norwegian along the way ;-)

If you have access to a Norwegian IP, then yes.

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

#146

Post by pastage »

intronic wrote: post #104
vintermann wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foreign LLMs are probably not trained on the Norwegian National Library. I regularly find things in there (with regular keyword search, for genealogy) which neither search engines or language models know. Of course I then usually put the information I'm interested in somewhere AI could scrape it. But it would take a long, long time to get everything interesting out of there.

Yep in the article it says ..the National Library .. has the single largest digital collection of Norwegian books, newspapers, web pages .. it is entitled to receive copies of every published book and broadcasted content. Its legal deposit mandate in this area extended beyond books, as it was duty-bound to collect and preserve all of Norway’s cultural heritage .. an agreement with Norwegian newspapers permitted LLM t…

> proprietary data

It is just copyrighted data, that is harder to get a hold of. All the copies are available to anyone to use if they just read it. Copyright makes other uses complicated. I wonder if the whole Creative commons debate was a mistake, you can never fix copyright in a digital world.

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

#148

Post by jahller »

andai wrote: post #81
black_puppydog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I h…

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right? I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak). So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please." I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Ti…

> If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

not necessarily. i often prompt Claude in German and then see the reasoning happening in English. of course it will eventually reply in German, but that does not mean that the tooling in the background was using German.

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

#149

Post by numpad0 »

cortesoft wrote: post #89
coliveira wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that French, Italian, African, Japanese people shouldn't have the inconvenience of instructing the LLM tool to get the basic facts about their own culture. They should use an LLM that has already been trained like that by default. Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American. If I go to Google for example I want to get facts about my own country in my own language.

Wouldn't those people be asking the questions in their own language in the first place? The model will reply in the language you use. This thread is about people asking for information about a language that is not the one they are messaging the LLM in

They always sound like an obnoxious American tourist talking through a translator, the chatbot training dataset is the same and foundation models are always built with >50% American English data for some reason.

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

#150

Post by ikr678 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #144
chvid wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I am chatting with ChatGPT - it is fairly obvious that it is American - its native language, its style, its attitude is American - even if we chat in Danish. Just as we cannot rely on Netflix and HBO to produce Scandinavian TV-shows even though they might do at the moment, we need to make our own stuff in this area too. And over time, the technology to do this will become cheap and readily available for us to do…

> And over time, the technology to do this will become cheap and readily available for us to do so. But then the English models will be even better and you'll be back to square one. My guess is that things are going to become more and more American. If you assume that "culture" is a resource like "microchips", then from economic point of view it makes sense to have one country specialize in producing it, and the rest…

'Only one country should export culture, for economic efficiency' is the kind of take that the Norweigians (and everyone else) would like to protect themselves from.
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