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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

#91

Post by wolvoleo »

vovavili wrote: post #48
joe_mamba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photo…

Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.

We also have much nicer societies than Russia. It's a dictatorship ffs.

And yes having nice things cost money. And a safety net is important.

I would never want to live in America even if I got 3x my wage. Nor Russia of course but that's a foregone conclusion.

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

#92

Post by jermaustin1 »

mvanbaak wrote: post #82

> Excluding harmful content #define(HARMFUL) [edit] Downvoters please tell me what the problem is with specifying this?

I didn't down vote you, but you aren't really adding anything to the conversation. This type of pithy comment might be fun on Reddit, but at HN, we try to provide more constructive, and information rich, comments.

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

#94

Post by numeri »

tgv wrote: post #29
Achterlangs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about the country but the language. Most llms have poor or no support for Dutch.

Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.

There's a large gap between making up words and an actually native text distribution. LLMs have a clear pattern, clear tells, a "feel" in English, and it's normally even more pronounced in non-English languages.

Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.

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

#95

Post by mschuster91 »

armcat wrote: post #70

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 i…

Kimi and Qwen come out of China, which means that their training material may be biased e.g. relating to Taiwan [1]. In addition, there is no way to determine what input went into the training, if it was properly licensed, if it was legal (e.g. not contaminated by CSAM), or how the human component of RLHF was sourced - in US models, for example, stories about exploitation like [2] have been floating for years.

Assuming us Europeans finally get our act together, I think it is better for our long-term future (and the ethical problems) if we manage to get a baseline of training input and data ourselves, from scratch, with everything being ethically sourced.

Oh and, while we're at it, the EU has 24 official languages plus a host of minority languages. Most LLMs focus on the English, German, French and Chinese languages, but everything else is... left behind at best. An European model with actual funding and proper data sources might be able to significantly reduce that.

[1] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6245677

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...

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

#98

Post by WarmWash »

layer8 wrote: post #51
stared wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud. With AI, it is even more strategic.

My impression is that in Europe much fewer people are convinced that AI-maxxing is necessary or even a net benefit.

Much fewer people in Europe are convinced maxxing anything besides work/life/life balance and generous social support are a benefit.

All the stuff that doesn't help an economy grow or pay for the future.

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

#99

Post by transcriptase »

sublimefire wrote: post #69

It is crazy that anything Europe gets so much hate. IMO it is important to build models within the boundaries of smaller nations, using their own language. Research has to continue even if it is outside of US and China.

It’s not that it gets hate so much as it’s akin to watching them make announcements that they’re going to make a European google/facebook/tiktok.

Sure… they can, except at the end of the day it’s a bit late, regulatory burden will make it comparatively useless, and because of that nobody will ever use it. It will be spending a bunch of taxpayer dollars for press releases.

The running joke is that when these “sovereign” EU models launch, they’re going to refuse to answer anything that might involve personal information such as Elon Musk’s birthday.

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

#100

Post by throw-the-towel »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #67
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 creat…

> economy is energy and energy is economy, and China really understood that

In former times the energy monopoly was called "The Power Company"; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning."

– CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"

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