> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :'(

A total of €13.5M has been allocated to the project.

I guess we’re going for GPT2 level capability?

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...

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

Is it a proposal or a model? And if it is a model, how fies it fare on benchmarks?

How do you use it?

So cute.

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.

Supposedly this model also aims to treat publishers of all sizes well. Looking forward to its launch soon :)

[flagged]

> Excluding harmful content

#define(HARMFUL)

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