yes but a sovereign can allocate some resources and a few people to stay in the loop from a first principles level. No need to wait for a rug pull.
Of course, it can not compete with the frontier labs. But good to have researchers and professors "in-house". LLMs are here for the long-term.
You take current version and build on top of it. You have the weights.
You might not get some n+1 version at some point but the n version you will have will be still most likely much better than whatever you come up with burning good will money of people believing in „sovereignty”.
You are not getting ahead in this game by being „true to your local values” capital expenditure is insane in this game.
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...
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 love it! So this is our answer to America and China denying foreigners access to their frontier models.. a massive 13,5M€ founding to develop souvereign european ai, trained exclusively on legally obtained documents and highest moral standards as defined in EU AI Act.
[0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...
> 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.
They do really good R&D on a lot of stuff. This is just their attempt at public credibility/internal skill building to enter the LLM business.
Doubt its going to be successful, but they "waste" a lot more money on other things that you never heard of. Its not fraud, its just R&D dressed up a little too much too early.
Other than actual research, which is in a different camp.
Besides that, there is a ton of use cases for smaller models for a bunch of different things. We'll be unlikely to be able to run LLMs (actually Large) on smartphones for a while, while the smaller LLMs seem to run already on-device in experiments.
Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running.
What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?
Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.
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.
I mean ... LLMs are sort of an extreme and living proof of linguistic determinism. Their behaviors are dictated almost entirely by disorganized language data, primarily English and Chinese. So you can't just add a language as native primary language in a quick post training, I think. There's no way that it would work.
"PewDiePie has built a custom web UI for self-hosting AI models called "ChatOS" that runs on his custom PC with 2x RTX 4000 Ada cards, along with 8x modded RTX 4090s with 48 GB of VRAM. Running open-source models from Baidu and OpenAI, PewDiePie made a "council" of bots that voted on the best responses, and then built "The Swarm" for data collection that will become the foundation of his own model coming next month."
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
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.
Ignorant comment
ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.
And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.
So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.
@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?
And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.
And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.
Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.
Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.
> Two years later, it joined a consortium, which included Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.[12]
Surely you understand that while you can have the latter, you can lack the former. Surely your brain can comprehend the difference between the two and you're just arguing in bad faith, right?
ASM (International) makes machines that add material to a silicon wafer (deposition).
ASML makes machines that remove material from said wafers (lithography, etching)
(I was a bit surprised that's not combined in 1 machine. But let's move on)
Then Besi makes machines to stack / interconnect / package those ICs into a package. I'm assuming pick & place machines are other companies' turf.
The above are all Dutch companies, operating a pretty important section of the tech stack.
Iirc there were (& probably still are) some IC fabs in Europe, but mostly older nodes (like useful for microcontrollers used by car manufacturers. Wikipedia has a list). So for SOTA smartphone SoCs it's off to Taiwan (TSMC), South Korea (Samsung) or China (who makes everything, including smartphones & the chips going in there).
So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check. Money? This is a rich continent.
What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".
But now the important thing: several of such initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and b) confidence that EU can do such things, is growing.
As for bureaucracy / red tape... sigh... (won't be fixed any time soon)
Also ASML even threatened to leave the NL if the Dutch government doesn't do what they want on taxes and labor policies. So having only a single card to play that EU can loose at any time, it's not putting EU tech sovereignty argument in a good light.
The "wahabout ASML" that keeps being spammed by people here, isn't proof of EU compute and AI sovereignty. It's the exception which is why it's the only thing people can mention on EU tech and they DDoS you with it as if that changes anything.
Are people here that petty that they can't stay on topic and argue in good faith and instead need to hijack your argument to go on offtopic whataboutism for a cheap gotcha spamming "whatabout ASML" on unrelated arguments?
Well, then this is will be a good start.
So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priority list.
Also back on the topic, the US managed to bring TSMC to open a cutting edge fab in the US and has already been operational for a while. Which already puts it way ahead of the EU on this front as well.
The thing is, US is much better on actually making things happen when push comes to shove. It saw it's deficient and vulnerable on domestic semiconductor manufacturing, it then made it happen with TSMC. It's doing the same with domestic ship building with Korean partners.
US might be slow moving, but somehow EU is even way slower at realizing and addressing its vulnerabilities, only waking up when it's far too late, causing it to pay a much more painful price for sleeping at the wheel (Russian invaded Ukraine in 2014 BTW, not in 2022, and they were building another gas pipeline with them), and when this type of own-goaling keeps repeating enough times you see the correlation with EU's decline as their economic rivals keep biting more and more market share from their industries as they sleep on critical changes and developments.
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 regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546
So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.
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".
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.
What people say matters much less than what they do.
All the stuff that doesn't help an economy grow or pay for the future.
What a wild statement, VC's are behind most of the growth in the US economy, and they directly drive up wages in tech. I'd be fascinated to hear a valid complaint of VC's that isn't just money envy
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 photos.
Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined
Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.
In many cases, well-established and well-liked European services have been supplanted by American counterparts that came later and were not really better in any way. They did usually have much more money to burn though, undercutting pricing until competition was dead.
I'm speaking in the past tense, because now for the first time in the couple of decades I can remember, there seems to be a somewhat commonly held preference for European suppliers.
I'm skeptical that high taxes is a large reason to lose to California of all places. Maybe in some important sense CA has "earned" that via talent and funding density while NL hasn't (from the perspective of a company, to be clear)
Companies go there because taxes are low for them, not necessarily for their employees(ignoring the NL 5 year tax break for foreigners). It's kinda like the US Delaware of Europe.
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.
But you know what hurts the most? That I know it wasn't always that way.
I'm sitting right now in the same country that invented the Minitel, built out the TGV network and the Grands Projets, and don't even get me started about the weird and wonderful machines they've got in that museum in Mulhouse, hell, you could go back in time to Gustave Eiffel. Industry and ambition used to be here. It was almost physically painful to discover that it seems to be gone now.
It's not gone, it just needs to be re-discovered. And the bureaucrats need to flash some € then get out of the way.
Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing
I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.
You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.
1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now.
2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't work with Europe"?
There's a whole bunch of grey in between the two, for example only having access to second rate models, but I'm not sure that particularly matters if the strategy is "second mover."
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.
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"
The US is a great place to live if you have talent, want to work, and want to reap the rewards.
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.
> 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.
They're training a model, not funding a startup. €13.5 million is plenty to pre- and post-train a decent model.
1. Huge tax incentives, let the companies get grossly wealthy while paying minimal taxes. Minimum 10 years with clauses protecting "retribution" taxes there after.
2. Tax incentives for the founders/shareholders, just like above.
3. Drop worker protections to a minimum, make it easy to fire people. You only want serious/dedicated employees anyway.
Within 2-3 years there will be at least a trillion dollars looking to get in.
Don't worry though if reading that made you mad. Its absolutely not going to happen. I can think of few things more antithetical to the European ethos than smart skilled people working 80-100hrs weeks with almost no vacation to gas their founders net worth by tens, hundreds, of billions.
I guess we’re going for GPT2 level capability?
Why don't they work together on it? Companies like Airbus have already been able to do that with aircraft.
And they're going to train an LLM with all kinds of extra difficulties compared to OpenAI for just 13.5M?
The very first Llama was 16M for one training.
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.
An ecosystem is the tribal knowledge, revolving door of talent, known processes etc.
If the end goal is to make a half assed Dutch speaking model, I think it won’t cut it. I don’t see anyone using it over Gemma 4b that runs on my laptop.
An ecosystem is more durable and has desirable second order effects.
#define(HARMFUL)
[edit] Downvoters please tell me what the problem is with specifying this?