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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

#61

Post by stared »

gonzalohm wrote: post #43
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…

You are saying that as if China or the US are completely isolated from the EU. We live in a globalized world whether you like it or not, and every supply chain spans multiple countries. Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing

Military race isn't a good think either, but you don't want to be on the losing side.

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

#62

Post by sarjann »

eightysixfour wrote: post #42
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…

I'll play devil's advocate a little bit - I'm not sure it is losing its "independence" by not taking part in the race. It could very well be that it is gaining independence from tech and choosing a "second mover advantage" to decide how it gets deployed after seeing how it impacts everyone else. Let the US and China experiment on the bleeding edge (and their citizens feel the effect, both good and bad), and then be p…

The problem is recursive self improvement creating a very difficult gap and the fact that power, compute has a lag from when you invest and when data centers come up.

You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.

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

#63

Post by nathanielsimard »

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.

I think it will be cost effective at some point. Computers were limited to research institutes before the personal computer arrived.

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

#64

Post by thepasch »

thatguymike wrote: post #49

> A total of €13.5 million has been allocated to the project. > This public investment underlines the importance of an independent, trustworthy and future‑proof Dutch language model. It does, but not in the way you think it does.

> It does, but not in the way you think it does.

They're training a model, not funding a startup. €13.5 million is plenty to pre- and post-train a decent model.

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

#65

Post by matheusmoreira »

nathanielsimard wrote: post #63
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.

I think it will be cost effective at some point. Computers were limited to research institutes before the personal computer arrived.

I hope you're right. I really don't want a future where only corporations and governments have computers.

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

#66

Post by ks2048 »

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…

How many in that list of things is the US also doing?

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

#67

Post by TacticalCoder »

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. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.

My ex-neighbor (when I was a teenager, living in Belgium) and very good friend really wanted to make it big. He became a chip engineer, moved to California, raised money for a first startup (it tanked) then raised money for a second startup. He made the world a better place (he created some very specific micro-inverters for solar panels) and made a $$$ exit.

The EU saw exactly zero of the wealth he created and he's never ever coming back to what he considers a failure of a continent.

That's the problem: many of the great minds with the mindset required to do great things already left the EU.

> So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.

And in energy (economy is energy and energy is economy, and China really understood that) the EU doomed itself to be in the hands of Russia.

We are a failure of sinking continent.

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

#70

Post by armcat »

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 its people, basically for free. Nations should mirror what Cursor has done with Composer 2.5 for example.
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