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EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

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Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#411

Post by stingraycharles »

dzikimarian wrote: post #130
whimsicalism wrote: post #57

[flagged]

While grant process in EU isn't fun, I think Levels has bit of an ego issues. He mentioned that if he had issues like that on eg X, he would see Elon himself in the replies. While he is great at converting his influencer status to income in his micro-SaaS projects, I don't think running ad-fueled browser games on state-sponsored super computer should be really aim of these grant programs.

Problem with these grant proposal things is that it favors established businesses over small founders. Establishes businesses have much more resources to go through all the legal / red tape issues.

I’ve seen this in practice with innovation subsidies: small startup has to spend a lot of time to go though all the hoops, taking up significant resources, to get modest compensation for actual innovative work. Larger business hires an external agency to do everything for them, to make silly proposals “convert website from jquery to react” as innovation, and gets thousands upon thousands of FTE-hours in subsidy compensation hours for it.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#412

Post by trollbridge »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100
mytailorisrich wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those 24 languages reflect all the languages that are official languages at country level. So for instance, Basque is not an official language of any country (only French in France and Spanish/Castilian in Spain). Belgium's official languages are French, Dutch, and German, "Flemish" is only a local variant of Dutch (Belgian French is also only a local variant of French).

Thanks. That makes sense. In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.

For what it’s worth, Castilian sounds very odd to American ears. For a good time you can ask «¿en castellano?» and be met with either a blank stare or laughter.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#413

Post by eru »

outside1234 wrote: post #149
rsynnott wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.

This raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.

Well, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it.

Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#414

Post by rzwitserloot »

Vinnl wrote: post #35
adzm wrote: post #2

For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language. Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages. All the others ar…

Tomorrow there are elections in the Netherlands, and two parties are proposing adding Frysian to that list: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/ Best get to retraining those models.

Not sure what happened there but your link disproves your statement.

Specifically, the link says two things:

1. That 2 parties want to add *limburgish* to the list, not frisian. That's the bottom-right part of The Netherlands, about as far removed from Friesland as you can get (which is the top part of the Netherlands).

2. That one party wants to add Frisian, but, that is a one-day fly party that will cease to exist in a few hours as they will get 0 seats in this election and will presumably call it a day right after. It was a party founded to support one person and that person has quit due to workstress, and is highly unlikely to return as this _was_ his return. Their opinion used to be relevant as they had 13.3% of the seats this past session (and didn't exist before it). But, it isn't here.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#415

Post by eru »

adastra22 wrote: post #394
hebelehubele wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.

They are considered separate languages in the same way that Chinese “dialects” are considered separate languages.

Some Chinese dialects are a lot further apart than eg English and German. They are mostly called 'Chinese dialects' rather than languages for political reasons. Gotta project that unity.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#416

Post by eru »

School-Cotton wrote: post #402
tacker2000 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but in practice pretty much the same except for some local changes in grammar and vocabulary, in written form. The dialects are a whole other thing though.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm specifically talking about colloquial Swiss German -- which is, I assume, what you mean by "the dialects" -- and not about Swiss Standard German, which is indeed very similar to German Standard German and can't be considered a different language. Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, u…

> Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).

I presume they also pick up a lot of standard German in the media: there's lots of German movies, and Germany has the biggest movie dubbing industry in the world, too. There's some Swiss German media, but not nearly as much as there's on offer in standard German.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#417

Post by layer8 »

jimbokun wrote: post #280
layer8 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European companies are smaller on average and less likely to go public in general, so market cap comparisons don’t show the whole picture. Growing big is less often seen as a goal than in the US. “Megacaps” aren’t necessarily considered a healthy thing to have.

Yes, and this all but guarantees that Europe will stay behind USA and China in their technology capabilities.

If it means sticking to their values, then so be it.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#418

Post by layer8 »

rcbdev wrote: post #284
layer8 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is an official EU language because Regulation 1 Article 1 says so [0] and hasn’t been changed. In practice, English is the most widely used language in EU institutions, so it would be have been silly to remove it after Brexit. [0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01...

It's a national language in Malta, making it a popular destination for "language weeks" in European schools, where English is usually a main subject.

That’s not why it is an official EU language, however.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#419

Post by layer8 »

raattgift wrote: post #264
layer8 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is an official EU language because Regulation 1 Article 1 says so [0] and hasn’t been changed. In practice, English is the most widely used language in EU institutions, so it would be have been silly to remove it after Brexit. [0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:01...

That said, whenever there is a language selection UI (e.g. at banking machines or institutional websites) in wider Europe that uses flags to represent languages -- probably not a good idea to start with, but very common -- the Irish tricolour should be used to indicate English rather than the UK or USA flags. (although cf Airteagal 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann).

Relatively few people would recognize that it’s meant to stand for English (including myself), so I’m unconvinced that this would be better.

Re: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

#420

Post by mensetmanusman »

neoromantique wrote: post #357
clickety_clack wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m actually bootstrapping, so the VC situation isn’t relevant to me. It’s a distant memory to me now, I’m building a company and so much has happened that the details of this decision have faded away. But, between the AI act and GDPR, there’s a set of potential traps laid out for you to step into, along with reams of paperwork. All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’…

Hi! EU Resident here, if anything, I'd want EU protections to apply even more to US companies than they do now. I don't want to exchange my freedoms for your shareholder value, thank you.

Which freedom for example? How is this arbitraged?
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