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  • Hacker News
  • Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments
    by HelloUsername
  • I think at this point what the Netherlands, and any other country that wants a good model in their language should do, is gather up every piece of text ever written in that language and license it to the big AI labs/companies for training. I'm sure there are vast libraries of books and other text that haven't been digitized and aren't a priority for the big labs.
    by bmenrigh
  • Interesting that this got posted now: the project is receiving increasingly more skepticism lately in the Dutch tech scene [0], and I think that’s fully justified.

    [0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...

    by rollulus
  • So good to see these developments. Every country should do this. I'd even say every person should gave their own personalized AI running on their own computers. If only the costs involved were not so astronomical.
    by matheusmoreira
  • > GPT‑NL is developed within the Netherlands and Europe. This gives us full control over the model, the data and the choices we make. We avoid dependency on non‑European providers and invest in a sustainable AI ecosystem aligned with our laws, values and societal goals.

    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.

    by siva7
  • If Europe is serious about getting home grown AI fast, three simple steps:

    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.

    by WarmWash
  • 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.
    by sublimefire
  • 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 its people, basically for free. Nations should mirror what Cursor has done with Composer 2.5 for example.
    by armcat

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