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- Hacker News
- Here's the models: https://huggingface.co/utter-project/models
I used the 9B Instruct version, from the small models, it was the one with the best Latvian knowledge out there, bar none. GPT-OSS 20B and Qwen3 30B A3B and similar ones weren't even close.
That said, the model itself was a little bit dumb and not something you'd really use for programming/autocomplete or tool calling or anything like that, which also presented some problems - even for processing text, if you need RAG or tool server calls, you need to use something like Qwen3 for the actual logic and then pass the contents to EuroLLM for translation/formatting with the instructions, at which point your n8n workflow looks a bit messy and also you have to run those two models instead of only one.
Meanwhile, the best cloud model for Latvian that I've found so far was Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but obviously can't use cloud models in certain on-prem use cases.
by KronisLV - If I ask something in Lithuanian, EuroLLM will reply in Latvian lol.
I have to specifically tell something like this: “do you known Lithuanian language”, then it starts replying in Lithuanian
by jim180 - Do they need this? Modern LLMs are trained on text in many languages and even if I throw medieval Gallician poetry at them[1] they can handle it.by Symmetry
- From the EuroLLM-9B page on hugginface;
>You need to agree to share your contact information to access this model
Is this common? I've never seen it on the site before, and it isn't on the smaller model. What are they collecting this information for?
- Yes, that's quite common.by airspresso
- I'm not sure which models require this and why, but I've come across it. e.g. the llama models, https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instructby ks2048
- The leading European ECommerce Company, Zalando with 50m users, is now using the leading European AI platform, Hopsworks, to power their real-time AI. Zalando are Databricks largest EU customer, but they are using Hopsworks instead for operational AI.
You would never hear it, though, as European IT press only promotes SV startups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QFiLhnuFg&feature=youtu.be
Disclaimer, i work at Hopsworks.
by jamesblonde - It is interesting how much traction this 9B model is getting which is good.
Still two month earlier 19 European language model with 30B parameters got almost no mention:
https://huggingface.co/TildeAI/TildeOpen-30b
Mind you that is another open model that is begging for fine-tuning (it is not very good out of box).
by sireat - I was thinking the same, why are so many superior models coming from only countries like US and China. And why are European countries not in the list other than France with Mistral. Why are so few companies in India, Japan, South Korea even close to a promising new model like what Chinese companies did ?by srameshc
- Does it even make sense? Just use the American or Chinese ones, adjust As needed. Where’s the point in spending millions to build The same thing or worse
- Because the value of these models is (actually) yet to be proven. Why saturate the market with something that we already have at least one of and others are selling as a service? No model provider (including the "big ones" like OpenAI) has been able to produce a viable business case. They're all literally running on government deals and investor money.by isodev
- EU made a >900 page law about AI and patted themselves on the back for being "the first to regulate AI" (which was not even true, China had an AI law before and it's two pages long).by sunaookami
- Because training frontier model is expensive and only US and China have capital structure to raise tens of billions of dollars to do it.by loandbehold
- As a European citizen I think it boils down to access to the capital. EU/EEA is not a country and the market is sort of fragmented. The big players are UK, France, Germany, everyone else does not have the same access to money as say in the US. Folks want to do it but there is a glass ceiling. Hence you have these collabs among large institutions to tap into funds such as from Horizon which are academic in nature and do not translate well into products.by sublimefire
- "Why" is a fair question but are you surprised? Europe is consistently behind in tech.
Europe has about 1.3 times the population of the USA and about 75% of the GDP yet EU tech output is a very small percentage of US tech output. We are not talking about 70, 50, 30, or even 20%. It's a drop in the bucket.
>The seven largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are 20 times bigger than Europe’s seven largest, and generate 10 times more revenue.
https://eqtgroup.com/thinq/technology/why-is-europes-tech-in...
"Why" is a good question, but I definitely wouldnt expect significant competition in LLMs from Europe based on the giant tech disparity. Having 1 non-cutting edge model that isn't really competitive is pretty much what I would expect.
by nonethewiser - Some cursory clicking about didn't reveal to me the actual corpus they used, only that it is several trillion tokens 'divided across the languages'. I'm curious mainly because Irish (among some other similarly endangered languages on the list) typically has any large corpus come from legal/governmental texts that are required to be translated. There must surely be only a relatively tiny amount of colloquial Irish in the corpus. It be interesting to see some evals in each language particularly with native speakers.
I think LLMs may be on the whole very positive for endangered languages such as Irish, but before it becomes positive I think there's an amount of danger to be navigated (see Scots Gaelic wikipedia drama for example)
In any case I think this is a great initiative.
- Can you provide a link about the “Scots Gaelic Wikipedia drama” you reference? I've heard of drama related to the Scots Wikipedia but that has nothing to do with Gaelic.by Timwi
- That tracks. I learnt Gaeilge Uladh growing up and standard Irish feels like reading or writing a legal agreement compared to the spoken word…by tadzikpk
- The EuroLLM-9B model release is from Dec/2024, and scores just above random chance for benchmarks like MMLU-Pro (17.6%, random chance is 10%).
Comparison with similar EU models + 600 other highlights:
by adt - Aren't all frontier models already able to use all these languages? Support for specific languages doesn't need to be built in, LLMs support all languages because they are trained on multilingual data.by loandbehold
- Meh, it depends a lot on the dataset, which are heavily skewed towards the main languages. For example they almost always confuse Czech and Slovak and often swap one for the other in middle of chatsby lm28469
- European governments have huge collections of digitalised books, research, public data.
But also European culture could maybe make a difference? You can already see big differences between Grok and ChatGPT in terms of values.
by whazor - Term support is vague. Can you do basic interaction in most other languages? Sure. Is it anywhere close to competence it has in english? No. Most models seem to just translate english responses at beginners simplistic monotone level.by ideasarecool
- Not natively, they all sound translated in languages other than English. I occasionally come across French people complaining about LLMs' use of non-idiomatic French, but it's probably not a French problem at all, considering that this effort includes so many Indo-European languages.by numpad0
- Nope. Capability begins to degrade once you move away from english.
Plus all your T&S/AI Safety is not solved with translation, you need lexicons and data sets of examples.
Like, people use someone in Malaysia, to label the Arabic spoken by someone playing a video game in Doha - the cultural context is missing.
The best proxy to show the degree of lopsidedness was from this : https://cdt.org/insights/lost-in-translation-large-language-...
Which in turn had to base it on this: https://stats.aclrollingreview.org/submissions/linguistic-di...
From what I am aware of, LLM capability degrades once you move out of English, and many nation states are either building, or considering the option of building their own LLMs.
by intended - Training is a very different thing. Can’t speak for European, but LLMs are often much worse in Japanese because tokenisation used Unicode and a single Japanese character often has to be represented by more than one tokenby charlieyu1
- No, that's not how training works. It's not just about having an example in a given language, but also how many examples and the ratio of examples compared to other languages. English hugely eclipses any other language on most US models and that's why performance on other languages is subpar compared to performance on english.by tensor
- > because they are trained on multilingual data
But they were not trained on government-sanctioned homegrown EU data.
by melvinmelih - >The EuroLLM Team brings together some of the brightest minds in AI including Unbabel, Instituto Tecnico Lisbon, the University of Edinburgh, Instituto de Telecommunicacoes, Université Paris-Saclay, Aveni, Sorbonne University, Naver Labs, and the University of Amsterdam.
>Europe is the only continent in the world to have a large public network of supercomputers that are managed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). As soon as we received the EuroHPC JU access to the supercomputer, we were ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We developed the small model right away and in less than 6 months the second model was ready.
[1] https://www.eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/eurohpc-success-story-speak...
Repurposing some of that physics sim compute
by htrp - This is the extent of the moat.by blitzar