22 comments

  • armcat 49 minutes ago
    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.
    • thevinter 45 minutes ago
      And what happens once the "solid baselines" become unavailable for a reason or the other?
      • zozbot234 28 minutes ago
        You keep building on the last available version? Fine tuning is a whole lot cheaper, easier and more useful than pretraining a model from scratch. It's a complete no brainer.
      • ozim 17 minutes ago
        Seems like you don’t understand.

        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.

    • mschuster91 10 minutes ago
      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...

  • sublimefire 51 minutes ago
    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.
    • transcriptase 1 minute ago
      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.

  • Aeolun 2 minutes ago
    A total of €13.5M has been allocated to the project.

    I guess we’re going for GPT2 level capability?

  • matheusmoreira 1 hour ago
    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.
    • nathanielsimard 1 hour ago
      I think it will be cost effective at some point. Computers were limited to research institutes before the personal computer arrived.
      • matheusmoreira 1 hour ago
        I hope you're right. I really don't want a future where only corporations and governments have computers.
  • wolvoleo 10 minutes ago
    We already had GEITje but it was banned by the courts. Of course it can still be found because the entire internet is not subject to Dutch law. But it did manage to stop development :'(
  • rollulus 3 hours ago
    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...

    • embedding-shape 3 hours ago
      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.

      • barrenko 2 hours ago
        I mean if you are wasting funds kind of knowing it's nowhere near remote competitive, then it's kind of a fraud.
        • athrowaway3z 2 hours ago
          TNO is something like semi-DARPA. It gets a lot of stuff tax free and a lot of gov funding, but a lot of their budget is from getting businesses to hire their R&D teams.

          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.

        • embedding-shape 2 hours ago
          But why is "competing against remote SOTA models on quality" the only thing that matters here?
          • barrenko 2 hours ago
            What the hell else is there? All the other stuff can be done by an intern with an 8 euro HF Pro subscription.

            Other than actual research, which is in a different camp.

            • embedding-shape 2 hours ago
              Common approach I've seen is having workflows with paid/larger/hosted models for some workflow where you don't quite know exactly how it'll be when you first put it together, then with time you've locked down how things more or less work yet you still need free-form text parsing of some kind, so you end up replacing the bigger models with carefully post-trained small models.

              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.

        • InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago
          Targeting a niche audience with specific requirements is not fraud.
  • dwa3592 2 hours ago
    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?

    • Achterlangs 2 hours ago
      It is not about the country but the language. Most llms have poor or no support for Dutch.
      • tgv 2 hours ago
        Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.
        • numeri 10 minutes ago
          There's a large gap between making up words and an actually native text distribution. LLMs have a clear pattern, clear tells, a "feel" in English, and it's normally even more pronounced in non-English languages.

          Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.

        • dvdkon 16 minutes ago
          There would be a bunch of value in having, say, a good 30B-class model that used my local language as well as it does English. There's lots of cases, especially in the government sphere, where local processing is a requirement and frontier-level capabilities aren't required. Making those cheap to run seems like a fine goal.
    • vrganj 21 minutes ago
      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.

      • wolvoleo 17 minutes ago
        Yes and also, US and Chinese models are censored in different ways. US models are way too prudish for personal use in Europe because they're afraid to piss off religious investors. Chinese models are too censored on history and current affairs, eg the tiananmen massacre never happened stuff like that.
    • applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago
      Why should Dutch people be expected to make do with models 99% trained on American/Chinese cultural context and language?
      • dwa3592 2 hours ago
        Understood, but they could fine tune base models on their own cultural context and language. Why reinventing the wheel?
        • numpad0 1 hour ago
          I thought finetuning data can't contradict foundation models, and anything that are inconsistent with the standard LLM American-Chinese split personality would be rejected?
          • zozbot234 25 minutes ago
            Fine tuning happens on top of pretraining, so of course it can "forget" pretrained defaults when warranted by the new data it's being fine tuned on.
        • DonHopkins 2 hours ago
          They could apply the Polder Model of consensus decision making with a mixture of experts.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model

          • nehal3m 1 hour ago
            Funny, that's what I thought when PewDiePie set up his monster AI rig and what he called a 'council'. Quote:

            "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...

        • applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago
          This gets better short-term results for a fraction of the cost, for sure, but what do you when China places an export control banning the release of open weight models? If you don't have your own talent, you're then relegated to using a base model from 2026 or whatever the cutoff date is, forever. That defeats the purpose of a 'sovereign' model made for and by your people.
    • SiempreViernes 1 hour ago
      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".
    • joe_mamba 2 hours ago
      >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.

      • davedx 2 hours ago
        Have you heard of ASML? NXP?

        Ignorant comment

        • joe_mamba 2 hours ago
          Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make?

          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.

          • dwa3592 2 hours ago
            >>ASML only makes the lithography machines

            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.

          • hdaz0017 1 hour ago
            The World's Most Important Machine ;)

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

            • joe_mamba 24 minutes ago
              Most important machine ... built on US IP, subject to US export restrictions, to manufacture high value US IP, in factories outside the EU, so profits of those chips goes to US. A point I have addressed over two times already.

              That "wahabout ASML" 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 topics.

              Shame people here can't argue in good faith and need to hijack your argument to go on offtopic whataboutism for a cheap gotcha spamming "whatabout ASML" on unrelated arguments of "EU doesn't build AI compute HW". Bad faith commenters all around.

          • fer 2 hours ago
            >ASML only makes the shovel making machines
      • dwa3592 2 hours ago
        >>Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware,

        Well, then this is will be a good start.

        • joe_mamba 2 hours ago
          EU bureaucrats are too busy trying to keep the welfare/pension system from collapsing, defeating Russia, supporting Ukraine, managing the fossil fuels energy shortages, figuring out how to nerf Chinese EVs while supporting domestic car companies, and restricting social media free speech to make sure the "far right" don't win elections.

          So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priority list.

          • ks2048 1 hour ago
            How many in that list of things is the US also doing?
            • nazgul17 28 minutes ago
              The US is a single country. Russia is not on the US' doorstep. The US has its own oil. The US prints the world reserve currency.
  • stared 2 hours ago
    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.

    • creesch 2 hours ago
      > 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".

      • stared 2 hours ago
        Sure.

        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.

        • layer8 2 hours ago
          My impression is that in Europe much fewer people are convinced that AI-maxxing is necessary or even a net benefit.
          • WarmWash 2 minutes ago
            Much fewer people in Europe are convinced maxxing anything besides work/life/life balance and generous social support are a benefit.

            All the stuff that doesn't help an economy grow or pay for the future.

          • c7b 1 hour ago
            And if you ask a bit more, you'll find that those same people are very likely to daily-drive AI models, desktop and phone operating systems and various other software critical to their professional and personal lives from US companies. And buy tons of Chinese products over Chinese or US e-commerce platforms.

            What people say matters much less than what they do.

        • king_phil 2 hours ago
          Which has nothing to do with VCs, just with sourcing decisions.
          • stared 2 hours ago
            If there were European MicroSoft or Google, there would be a preference.
          • guywithahat 43 minutes ago
            Well those companies exist because of VC's, and the nation's business freedom compared to Europe
      • guywithahat 44 minutes ago
        > There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy

        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

    • ews 2 hours ago
      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.
      • joe_mamba 2 hours ago
        >It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem

        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.

        • vanviegen 2 hours ago
          I think much of that is because European customers (both private and business) tended to prefer American suppliers over suppliers from European countries that were not their own. That may have something to do with most people in IT being quite fluent in English, while European products were all-to-often half-heartedly translated from German/French/Spanish/Polish/Italian/Ukranian.

          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.

        • vovavili 2 hours ago
          Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.
          • conradkay 1 hour ago
            > If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.

            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)

          • wolvoleo 15 minutes ago
            We also have much nicer societies than Russia. It's a dictatorship ffs.

            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.

        • throw-the-towel 32 minutes ago
          Frankly, being Russian myself, I'm also very disappointed by the state of tech in Europe.

          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 at 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.

    • gonzalohm 2 hours ago
      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

      • stared 1 hour ago
        Military race isn't a good think either, but you don't want to be on the losing side.
    • eightysixfour 2 hours ago
      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.

      • sarjann 1 hour ago
        The problem is recursive self improvement creating a very difficult gap and the fact that power, compute has a lag from when you invest and when data centers come up.

        You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.

        • eightysixfour 49 minutes ago
          These things are true, however:

          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 AI? 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."

      • stared 2 hours ago
        Let’s autonomous Russian drones, and Europe is at mercy of two other empires, who capitalize on this opportunity.
    • input_sh 2 hours ago
      Serious question: what does any of that have to do with the submitted article? Where is the relevance to the topic at hand?
    • TacticalCoder 1 hour ago
      > 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.

    • surgical_fire 2 hours ago
      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.

  • wrs 3 hours ago
    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.
  • thatguymike 2 hours ago
    > A total of €13.5 million has been allocated to the project.

    > 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.

    • thepasch 1 hour ago
      > 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.

  • jurschreuder 20 minutes ago
    What are they going to train with 13.5M really? We're a tiny company in Amsterdam in Holland and we've got "only 64x B300 to train on" so we could never make an LLM I thought, since we've got only 4M in compute.

    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.

    • LaurensBER 16 minutes ago
      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.

  • HelloUsername 4 hours ago
    Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments
  • sarjann 1 hour ago
    I wonder with these stories. Why are there so many individual country efforts? We know the scale needed with scaling laws / capital / energy. Most of these countries alone can barely compete (even large groups of them would struggle.

    Why don't they work together on it? Companies like Airbus have already been able to do that with aircraft.

  • gnegggh 2 hours ago
    I'm making a Dutch dictionary and would be interested to see how this model would fair in evals vs non specialized ones. I've tested a variety of models for https://hetnederlands.com content and differences can be big
  • jansenmac 3 hours ago
    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.
    • frangonf 3 hours ago
      So it's a model that's sovereign as in sovereign kingdom of the Netherlands vs sovereign for the people's?
      • embedding-shape 3 hours ago
        "sovereign" the marketing term basically means "in-house" now, where "house" depends on who says it.
  • stared 3 hours ago
    Is it a proposal or a model? And if it is a model, how fies it fare on benchmarks?
  • dr_dshiv 1 hour ago
    How do you use it?
  • debarshri 49 minutes ago
    So cute.
  • simianwords 3 hours ago
    I really think countries should build a sovereign _ecosystem_ and sovereign models are an excuse to achieve it.

    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.

  • Marciplan 4 hours ago
    Supposedly this model also aims to treat publishers of all sizes well. Looking forward to its launch soon :)
    • adalacelove 3 hours ago
      Maybe it's time to acknowledge that current copyright laws do more harm than good and put another framework in place.
  • GreenSalem 45 minutes ago
    [flagged]
    • dash2 39 minutes ago
      This really isn’t what HN is for. I think you should read the guidelines. I’ve looked at your posting history and it is all like this: relentless negativity with low information content.
    • jermaustin1 42 minutes ago
      Why are you being nasty? And in what world is the Netherlands a second-world nation?
  • mvanbaak 28 minutes ago
    > Excluding harmful content

    #define(HARMFUL)

    [edit] Downvoters please tell me what the problem is with specifying this?

    • jermaustin1 14 minutes ago
      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.