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AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

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Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#71

Post by pcardoso »

evandrofisico wrote: post #43
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

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.

As a father of 3, I’m kind of guilty of that prejudice myself.

It is not towards Brazilians themselves, which I frankly respect, but because of the low quality stuff my kids are exposed to on the internet. You just can’t avoid it and of having the kids gravitate towards YouTube instead of better entertainent channels.

Random dumb YouTubers doing shit for giggles and overly sexualized funk music. And the shorts, oh the shorts crap everywhere, in all languages.

I don’t have a problem with my kids watching “manual do mundo” or “Paula stefania”. Or “porta dos fundos” myself. Good stuff.

On the other hand, Apple developer relations suports Brazilian Portuguese only, when they do not distinguish between variants of English, French and Spanish: I had to submit an English translation of a plain simple and clear document because my Portuguese version was rejected.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#72

Post by futune »

swiftcoder wrote: post #66
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Portu…

I guess Americanisms bleeding over into English LLMs as used in Britain happens similarly.

Should we also be expecting to see bleed-over of Indian English into generic English LLMs? Or is it not relatively large enough compared to America to force it, unlike Brazil to Portugal?

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#73

Post by matusp »

embedding-shape wrote: post #10
swiftcoder wrote: post #6

It is definitely an interesting problem, because Portugal is a small enough country that the actual total corpus of available texts in (non-Brazilian) Portuguese is potentially problematic.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

Never heard the term Lusophone before. TIL

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#74

Post by lmf4lol »

joe_mamba wrote: post #58
lmf4lol wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everyone on this project probably learned a lot doing it, dont you think!

I'd also want to get paid to work on stuff not meant to bring any financial returns to my employer, just to learn and pad my resume. Sounds like a sweet gig. Where do I sign up?

become a scientist? apply for research grants. Join an NGO.

Lots of options

Not everything has to return money.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#75

Post by joe_mamba »

lmf4lol wrote: post #74
joe_mamba wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also want to get paid to work on stuff not meant to bring any financial returns to my employer, just to learn and pad my resume. Sounds like a sweet gig. Where do I sign up?

become a scientist? apply for research grants. Join an NGO. Lots of options Not everything has to return money.

>become a scientist? apply for research grants. Join an NGO.

You mentioned only 2(grants are also academia) and most NGOs don't hire SW devs. That's hardly "lots", basically none out of academia.

>Not everything has to return money.

But then where does that money they give you come from?

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#76

Post by pjmlp »

mariopt wrote: post #40

This 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 Portuguese living abroad, reading the article made me think exactly the same , even though I wasn't even aware of the project.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#77

Post by pjmlp »

evandrofisico wrote: post #43
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

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.

As portuguese immigrant that has lived in a few European countries I find this growing attitude quite sad.

It starts by we emigrate all over the place, when something happens to a portuguese abroad due to xenophobic attitudes, it is all over the place on the news, they squeeze the juice until there is no more news to talk about.

Then some folks decide to do exactly the same to others that like us abroad, decide to try their luck in Portugal.

And yes, I have experience what means to be shown that Portuguese aren't welcomed.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#78

Post by pjmlp »

embedding-shape wrote: post #10
swiftcoder wrote: post #6

It is definitely an interesting problem, because Portugal is a small enough country that the actual total corpus of available texts in (non-Brazilian) Portuguese is potentially problematic.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

You're missing African Portuguese.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#79

Post by pjmlp »

matusp wrote: post #73
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

Never heard the term Lusophone before. TIL

It is broader than that, it means all the countries that speak Portuguese as official language, there are quite a few.

Usually only Portugal and Brazil come up in conversations.

In reality the list is wider, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese-speaking_world

African Portuese is also closer in way of speaking to European Portuguese than Brasilian Portuguese, as we also tend to share some common slang that comes in from creole.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#80

Post by dormento »

edwcross wrote: post #63
upupupandaway wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps a bought theme and they forgot to test for mobile.
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