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- Hacker News
- This is not an open source model. In that sense I think the sovereign claim is a bit strange. It's the data providers that determine access to the model.by jansenmac
- So it's a model that's sovereign as in sovereign kingdom of the Netherlands vs sovereign for the people's?by frangonf
- 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 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.
by stared - Serious question: what does any of that have to do with the submitted article? Where is the relevance to the topic at hand?by input_sh
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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
by gonzalohm - 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.by ews
- > 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".
by creesch - They’re building a competitive-quality model, from scratch, with fair compensation to content owners, for €13.5 million? Something’s wrong with this picture.by wrs
- Being cheap is on brand for inhabitants of the sea floor. Nothing is wrongby Muromec
- I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there.
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?
by dwa3592 - 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".
- Why should Dutch people be expected to make do with models 99% trained on American/Chinese cultural context and language?
- To be fair. There is a security concern angle: even open-source models could be trained as sleeper agents that act adversarially (for example, adding backdoors) when used in specific national companies in specific settings. This is very difficult to detect or void, so if you want to be sure 100% that this isn't the case, you have to train your own model from scratch.by andy12_
- It is not about the country but the language. Most llms have poor or no support for Dutch.by Achterlangs
- There's an absolutely massive cultural and behavioural bias in those models. Models will suggest things like "go to the hospital" for things that require GP appointments, "just drive three hours" while it's faster to go places by train, and so on. They will do it in anglicised Dutch (compound words split, English-like grammar structures) that's perfectly understandable, but the cultural bias is there if you know to look for it.
Furthermore, the expertise in designing and training these models is valuable as well. The existing models are good as a starting point in terms of learning from previous mistakes, but we should not just let a handful of American and Chinese people keep the knowledge and expertise.
One problem with this particular project, though, is that copyright has been enforced for Dutch LLM training before, and the AI industry cannot exist without massive scale piracy, the likes of which has never been seen before. A lot of Dutch training material exists in pirated books that AI companies in countries that do not care about copyright have access to, but are exempted from the training set here. The impact of enforcing copyright on an AI model will be quite interesting to see.
by jeroenhd - 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.
by vrganj - Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments
- Two and a half years and still not complete? That's ridiculous.by ronsor
- 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
- Yeah except replace "license it to the companies for training" with "pay the companies to train on it"by tantalor
- I think they should just make a national security thing and gather every piece of text in every language.by whateverboat
- 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 - 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.
- 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.
- Nvidia will certainly be pleased.by 14u2c
- "Champions of a European AI model should ask themselves if a European effort would be more effective than Meta, which this year will spend more on chips ($125 billion) than Germany spends on defense ($114 billion) and offer salaries of over $100 million to attract the best researchers, and is still failing to catch up. Elon Musk tried and failed to build a good AI model."
https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/nineteen-thoughts-on-ai-a...
by jstummbillig - I think it will be cost effective at some point. Computers were limited to research institutes before the personal computer arrived.