The Amália model is not yet publicly available. Until it's ready, one can fool around with Anália at https://analia.pt
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AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#62This model is a waste of Public Funds. There is no public website to use it, be it free or paid, the dataset is not public, the code is not public (The github URL in the article returns 404 ), the claimed model intelligence is so low that is pretty much useless at 32K context and massively inferior to GPT‑4o. As per tradition in Portugal, some people managed to get 5.5 Million to produce nothing and no one is asking…
As a pt-BR speaker from across the pond: https://soberania.ai/ Similar waste.
Given that their publication says the dataset is freely available on Huggingface that's at least something ig
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#63This model is a waste of Public Funds. There is no public website to use it, be it free or paid, the dataset is not public, the code is not public (The github URL in the article returns 404 ), the claimed model intelligence is so low that is pretty much useless at 32K context and massively inferior to GPT‑4o. As per tradition in Portugal, some people managed to get 5.5 Million to produce nothing and no one is asking…
As a pt-BR speaker from across the pond: https://soberania.ai/ Similar waste.
Interestingly, the mobile version of the website contains a hamburger menu with an "Equipe" (Team) link that returns a 404 error (https://soberania.ai/equipe).
This link is absent from the desktop version.
Isn't it a bit odd that the team responsible for it is nowhere to be credited?
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#64The Amália model is not yet publicly available. Until it's ready, one can fool around with Anália at https://analia.pt
That name change…
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Portugal has a growing Xenophobic attitude towards immigrants, specially Brazilians and this is reflected in linguistic prejudice. They have concerns of portuguese children learning to "speak brazillian" because there is a lot more of video content being produced in Brasil than in Portugal and stuff like movies, videogames and software in general are avaliable in brazilian localization/adaptation first.
We have the same thing happening, on multiple levels, here too. First some Spanish parents are afraid the children aren't listening and watching enough Spanish media. Then additionally, some Catalan parents are afraid the children don't get to use Catalan in school so they don't become proficient enough to use it in society.
Spain also took the route of dubbing foreign media, whereas Portugal tends to subtitle instead. This sort of exacerbates the situation, since it means that typically any Portuguese dubs of American media will be Brazilian.
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
European Portuguese is the 13th most populous language in Europe. Not that small, there are many other European languages in use that are much smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
What makes Portugal's situation unique is that it is a small population that is eclipsed in models by the bigger weights of the much bigger population of Brazil. Yes, there are much smaller European countries, but those are generally the only source of truth for their specific language, so the context of a LLM query in that language steers the LLM towards facts from that country, for example, if I ask a big generic L…
> Maybe the UK and Spain have somewhat similar struggles, but I suspect that none has it as bad as Portugal in that regard.
There are ~26x more Portuguese speakers worldwide than in Portugal. Only 13x more Spanish speakers worldwide than in Spain. Depending on how you count (English is really widespread as a native-but-second language), there are about 20x more English speakers worldwide than in the UK.
So yes, Portugal has it pretty bad by the numbers.
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe always has a thing for their languages. They think many languages make them stronger while spending billions in system loss due to communication barriers. It is obvious they will try to do the same with LLMs and call it the next best thing since bread and butter. I went to JCON EUROPE this year. The amount of "Europe this" "Europe that" "sovereign this, sovereign that" is mind boggling and just a waste of time…
whats your suggestion? we just eradicate all of our culture and languages and go full on english ? whats wrong with exploring ways to keep national languages alive in the LLM area
There's an obvious advantage to everyone speaking the same language - although perhaps real-time translation with LLMs and hardware like the Timekettle will reduce this problem. Personally, I wouldn't really care if that language were English or Mandarin Chinese tbh.
Training an entire LLM model for each language is going to be incredibly expensive and likely a waste of resources. Keep in mind that all the big LLMs can already speak these languages anyway - this effort is just to make a 'pure' Portuguese LLM.
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#68What a waste of time and money. Trying to force a LLM into a specific language makes you missed out on most of the world knowledge.
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It reminds me of Qwant - the French Google alternative that got a load of public money. The fact you've probably never heard of it shows how well that went.
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have the same thing happening, on multiple levels, here too. First some Spanish parents are afraid the children aren't listening and watching enough Spanish media. Then additionally, some Catalan parents are afraid the children don't get to use Catalan in school so they don't become proficient enough to use it in society.
Spain also took the route of dubbing foreign media, whereas Portugal tends to subtitle instead. This sort of exacerbates the situation, since it means that typically any Portuguese dubs of American media will be Brazilian.
AFAIK there is no Brazilian dubbing in Portugal, the only commonly dubbed media are animated movies and they are always dubbed by Portuguese VA's.
Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
#70I'm not sure the direction should be to finetune a small local model for each country or language. These models are already not particularly great at information retrieval, so I doubt anyone would use them for questions like the author suggests (ie who was the president between X and Y). Similarly, they are a little too lightweight to be used for translations too. If the budget is indeed so modest (5.5 million euros!…
> who was the president between X and Y
this is the type of question that should never ever be asked to an llm running on some A100 on the other side of the world, local llms are already more than capable to answer these