NL could simply say: no more ASML machines, and no more ASM wafers.

And what happens once the "solid baselines" become unavailable for a reason or the other?

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...

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.

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

What is the exact skepticism? The only thing I could get from that was from some "tech entrepreneur":

> GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.”

That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to start with something, then ramp up, rather do what only a select few labs been able to do, start with really big models. Especially if you're resource constrained, which since this is a government project, I really hope for the sake of the tax payers it was.

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

An LLM is an encoding of a culture, a way of viewing the world.

They are not neutral technology, they are a direct representation of the training set that has been chosen and how they are aligned.

In many ways, they are ideology made code.

If we leave building them to the US and China, only their way of seeing things will be digitized.

I don't like the idea of that.

Why should Dutch people be expected to make do with models 99% trained on American/Chinese cultural context and language?

Really? Because I'm pretty sure that at least every two days there's a active post with a top voted comment along the lines of "The EU isn't doing AI themselves, they are so hosed".

>Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening

Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, and EU Green eco-communists and NIMBVYs don't want to have data centers built in their backyard, so the only way left for EU consultancies to milk taxpayer money for the AI bubble, is shipping a sovereign AI model for each country/language.

Watch out US tech sector, we're coming for you. Feel our wrath.

> 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.

> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs.

Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".

Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.

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

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 picky about how you use it.

I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.

Serious question: what does any of that have to do with the submitted article? Where is the relevance to the topic at hand?

> 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.

Europe is not a country.

Regulations are not even throughout each of the 27 member states. Each country is relatively small in the world stage.

Until EU progresses towards federalization, discussing this is a moot point.

Two and a half years and still not complete? That's ridiculous.

Prices for training have dropped immensely in terms of research required, code efficiency, algorithmic/sample efficiency, and possibly also hardware (I'm not qualified to say without looking it FLOPS/dollar, or even to be certain that's the right metric here).

This is too little, too late. Europe really need to start focussing.

All these tiny niche models are perhaps fun as an academic exercise or great for the researchers resume but I highly doubt that they'll add any value or will be used for anything serious.

Even if this becomes a somewhat decent model with a fantastic understanding of "gezellig", "kring verjaardag" or "pannenkoeken", how many people will interact with it before the limits of it will drive them back to a frontier model?

Even if the purpose of this is government & other regulated industries, do we really want our government to use a poor model? Either do it right or don't do it at all.

So it's a model that's sovereign as in sovereign kingdom of the Netherlands vs sovereign for the people's?

Maybe it's time to acknowledge that current copyright laws do more harm than good and put another framework in place.

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.