OpenEuroLLM | Hacker News Reader

OpenEuroLLM

openeurollm.eu

304 pointsrichardfontana170 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 - Feb 2025 (279 comments)

> OpenEuroLLM has a total budget of €37.4 million of which €20.6 million comes from the Digital Europe Programme.

So on average 1.87 million per participating institution which might amount to funding ~5 PhD students per institution. Not bad for a training program.

The project has been awarded the Sovereignity Seal, an EU mark of Excellence before it even started. This is truly in accordance with european values, where we reward participation and proclamation. I don't think we will ever hear again from this project.

Congratulations to the participants of the consortium for receiving this large EU grant. Thoughts and prayers to the students who will be writing the deliverable progress reports.

> This is truly in accordance with european values, where we reward participation and proclamation.

Yes. In my experience the government is happy with "looks good doesn't work" as long as it truly looks good.

Thank goodness we have startup culture in the US, instead we can have “looks bad, doesn’t work, but Microsoft bought it so…”

and "actively erodes human community and democratic society"

That's the ones that don't get bought.

Unicorns are carnivores that prey on the people.

Microsoft is certainly much better at judging the value of a software than any european administration.

I dunno, every software product I use in the US has been getting worse over time. Even if Europe is doing nothing, at least they aren’t accelerating in the negative direction.

Of all the software companies, Microsoft really makes me feel the ick every time I have to interact with their suite. I started using again teams after months and I didn't remember it was so bad, it's like a reverse course on ux

Then please switch for a product made by the EU. Call me when you've read through 300 pages of documentation to discover there was no product.

Lol yeah unlike corporationd who are happy with “makes life intentionally worse but brings in money”.

Jesus the ideology in this place runs so thick with some people.

It’s truly absurd the ways some people here twist logic. “Government did it” means it MUST be bad, of course. It takes a willful ignorance, pretending that all government efforts are bad and all corporate efforts are therefore good.

As if ARPAnet just sprang from a group of MBAs sitting around unemployed.

When I read 1984 in high school, I didn’t really get the scariest bit: a lot of people are PROUD to shout that 2 + 2 = 5 as long as it makes a poor person somewhere else sad.

for 1.87m per project, you get in EU rather 15 - 20 people :) (salaries are low here)

I assume the largest portion will be consumables, travel, meetings etc.

At least in France, where they have PhDs which last only 3 years, a years of PhD would cost ~45K EUR in gross salary (granted the student gets around half of that after tax), then let's say ~10K travel and consumables costs, then add up the inevitable 20% overhead costs and now you're looking at around 200K for the shortest possible frugal 3 year PhD.

At least in the UK, overheads are usually over 100%.

....at best :( - more in certain universities.

This sounds like quite an outlandish figure, could you please elaborate? For example, an ERC grant would allow for a maximum of 25% of the so called "indirect costs", that is, one fourths of all the the direct costs (gross salaries, materiel, travel, etc) gets paid as a lump sum, and this usually goes to the institution. How do you end up with over 100% overheads?

I recall putting a grant proposal together. An RA salary of £40K was charged to the project at £110K. Those numbers are roughly accurate, might actually have been slightly higher.

I’m not sure how that gets accounted in different schemes, perhaps it is somehow impossible in ERC grants, but it is certainly the case in some grants.

25% cap would I think make most universities bankrupt overnight.

I suspect a large part of that 110K would be the government's cut. Again, coming back to the french system, an employee getting 40K after taxes costs ~80K to the institution there. I didn't think of the salary taxes as overheads, we count them as direct costs.

I agree, in Germany companies PhD funding seems to be between 200 and 300k.

Show me any source of a German company funding a PhD role with 200.000 EUR or 300.000 EUR salary

Sorry, this is just not true

These are gross overall costs for the full PhD, not yearly salary.

I mean gross salary, for all 3-4 years for your employer. You‘d be surprised how much money is spent on paying your salary (as well as other expenses like traveling to conferences and equipment). No one is talking salary.

the math is quite simple:

as PhD ("Doktorand") Student/Finisher, you will get around 45.000 EUR - 60.000 EUR in most jobs, maybe there are some mega corps like BMW or Siemens which will pay more (or consulting or IB etc.), but the vast majority of jobs with a "research background" in Germany will NEVER land you near 100.000 or more

so the math is:

1.800.000 / 50.000 (avg) is 36 persons, somewhere in the ballpark range i mentioned

Well, no. That money is the total grant sum, to be spent over multiple years, and PhDs are usually funded in full - in Germany a PhD takes around 5 years. Moreover, the money a PhD student gets after tax, is not the same as the money spent overall from the grant, see my other comment below.

In Europe a PhD student is a multiyear commitment, with a bunch of externalities, they are much simpler to manage as discrete units, and thus are funded as such.

Sovereignity Seal -- https://strategic-technologies.europa.eu/investors_en is just a fund for investing in strategic technologies, it's meant for projects that are getting started.

My comment from the original submission [1]:

--- As someone who is in general skeptical of programs like this (and an European) there are 2 remarkable / timely things about this: - This project doesn't just allocate money to universities or one large company, but includes top research institutions as well as startups and GPU time on supercomputing clusters. The participants are very well connected (e.g. also supported by HF, Together and the likes with European roots) - Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources, but you can stay sufficient close to the frontier to make a dent.

Europe needs to try this. Will this close the Gap to the US/China? Probably not. But it could be a catalyst for competitive Open source models and partially revitalize AI in Europe. let's see..

PS: on Twitter there was a screenshot yesterday that in a new EU draft, "accelerate" was used six times. Maybe times are changing a little bit.

Disclaimer: Our company is part of this project, so I might be biased. --- I hope the next time this is on HN, it's with some cool release and not a PR :).

(@mods please delete if copy-quoting not allowed)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42924802

What about the very similar sounding EuroLLM[1] project mentioned elsewhere[0] in the comments? If that is indeed a different project, why not pool resources? EuroLLM has already delivered some models, they are up on Hugging Face[2][3].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119913

[1] https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm

[2] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B

[3] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B

It is worth noting there is _another_, completely unrelated project (also) called *EuroLLM* that is also EU funded which not only shares many of the same goals, but has already fulfilled many of them:

1. large multilingual dataset

2. open science approach

3. competitive performance

Here is the HF blogpost that introduced it in December 2024 (along with various benchmarks): https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b

The project's lead has summarized the situation succinctly in their LinkedIn post [0]

  I hope the different communities collaborate openly, share their expertise, and don't decide to reinvent the wheel every time a new project gets funded. Next what? "OpenEuroLLM with real cheese"?

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andre-martins-31476745_ai-art...

Homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm

Deliverables:

- A series of models of different sizes for optimal effectiveness and efficiency (1B, 9B and 22B) trained on 4T tokens

- A multimodal model which can process and understand speech or text input

- Full project codebase available to the public with detailed data and model descriptions

I can't find the codebase yet though

Results don't seem that bad for 9b https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b

"...EuroLLM-9B was trained on approximately 4 trillion tokens, using 400 Nvidia H100 GPUs on the MareNostrum5 supercomputer..."

Related: MareNostrum5 is part of the eurohpc some bashed in other comments.

Not related: it's in a church in Barcelona, I wanted to visit it but when I went to Barcelona it was closed for holidays so they didn't do visited tours. I also discovered the 5th most powerful supercomputer is by Italian energy company ENI, of all the companies that could have been I wouldn't have never expected an energy company to have such a powerful supercomputer (the first 3 are usa labs supercomputers, the 4th is a Microsoft supercomputer)

I've been running it with Ollama, it's actually pretty good for working with text in Latvian (and other EU languages). I'd be hard pressed to find another model of a similar size that's good at it, for example: https://huggingface.co/spaces/openGPT-X/european-llm-leaderb...

This won't be relevant to most people here, but it's cool to see even the smaller languages getting some love, instead of getting garbage outputs from Qwen (some versions of which are otherwise pretty good for programming) and anything below Llama 70B, or maybe looking at Gemma as a middle ground.

Thanks for the heads up, I missed this project! However, on their page they write "Project Timeline: 1 May 2024 - 30 April 2025". April isn't far away, anyone knows what's supposed to happen afterwards?

That timeline is just for the preliminary hearing on potential committee members.

No sarcasm, sorry.

This should probably link to the actual press release since its more of an announcement of something forming rather than a release of any models, code, whitepapers, etc.

https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release

This is classic EU. An announcement of an effort to collect collaborators to discuss doing something that they might do in the future.

>This is classic EU. An announcement of an effort to collect collaborators to discuss doing something that they might do in the future.

It should be done in secret? How did they manage to create CERN? maybe there was no reddit like people commenting back then?

No, but collaboration comes with a cost too.

As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate.

But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling

So CERN and similar? you think it could have been done without any coordonation? Like 2 guys faking under they make it USA style ?

They mistake transparency for performativity, and secrecy for practicality

Well, what actual value did cern produce beyond theoretical research with no application in sight?

The web. Some people use that.

In case you're serious: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

ARPANET and its successor TCP/IP already provided the fundamental networking infrastructure. Various hypertext systems were also being developed independently in and before the 1980s, like Ted Nelson's Xanadu project and Bill Atkinson's HyperCard. The key ideas of linked documents and markup languages were "in the air" so to speak. However, CERN provided some unique conditions that helped the WWW succeed where other systems didn't. It had an immediate practical need - helping physicists share information across institutions. It was developed in an open, non-commercial environment that encouraged sharing. CERN made the WWW technology freely available without royalties. The international nature of CERN helped drive early adoption across countries.

Without CERN, I think we would have eventually seen some form of hyperlinked document system emerge from either academia or industry, but it might have been more proprietary or fragmented.

And NASA? they just send robots in space to make pictures? Not sure why you are here and not on TikTok with such anti science ideology.

Many things including New forms of cancer treatment https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/fighting-cance...

Theoretical research in itself is one of the actual values. Any real-world application from CERN are purely incidental (albeit welcome).

The other values include redistribution of wealth, support for businesses, job creation, sustaining internal intellectual capabilities without depending on the whims of fickle corporations, and probably many others that I can't think of for now.

I don't get this. At the beginning of the press release they cite eurohpc. Before eurohpc, it was probably announced with a similar press release. And then it existed

Collaboration brought us peace. Peace is underrated these days.

(NB: I mean the good kind of collaboration of course, on science and industry - it's a loaded word in French at least)

I don't agree with that. We had two powers dividing Europe in two, placing their own armies all over the place and doinglg their best to convince the other party that the world would be destroyed if it dared to attack. That was what brought us peace. Collaboration in the form of the various European international organizations was a consequence.

Making another war in Europe was basically impossible. We had one in Yugoslavia which was not aligned with the two blocks and anyway only after the USSR lost the cold war.

The idea is that EU countries do not see themselves at rivals, this is very different then our entire history where everyone had an issue with their neighbors (there are exceptions of neighbors not having any conflicts). Most educated Europeans are now considering the entire EU as a similar culture and not want to start a fight to kill each other for some historical land, the exception are the uneducated or just low IQ people that fall for extreme nationalists that push for "Make our country a great empire again"

Your point is about the Cold War, nuclear weapons prevented nuclear alliances to attack each other, it did not prevent say two NATO non nuclear members to start conflicts.

It probably should not be number 2 on Hacker News, unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort

>It probably should not be number 2 on Hacker News, unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort

I agree, but some EU people want to share it and USA guys and EU skeptiks want to shit on it. Probably we should post a wikipedia article about CERN and have Elon fanboys explain how Elon can do it it better while his bit* Trump could make our eggs cheaper.

> unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort

But it obviously does? Maybe not people who "want" but definitely many who "might".

If anything this is one of the better places to advertise, and certainly more interesting than another "Hooli (YC99) is hiring to democratize breathing".

It’s like telling someone you’re planning on starting a diet and getting congratulated.

So tell us how NASA is doing this decades long plans, they should keep them secret? Should HNers vote on what NASA should do ?

See Artemis for an answer to how NASA is doing. They’re in trouble. Post Apollo they became very ineffective at big space projects. I say that with respect as an aviator who has benefited much from their past and ongoing work.

I guess the main point is that NASA is forced to have contracts to verious USA states because of politics, but you have robots on Mars, space probes outside the Solar System, and other ambitious plans that are announced and discussed not revealed in a PR conference where the CEO removes a blanket and shows you the latest robot and fanboys chear.

I understand MAGA and Elon fanboys are attacking NASA and claim that master Elon can do it better so the government should give Elon all the money, no auctions or checks to be done. I mean all Elon promises were fulfilled on time and on budget , right ?

> It should be done in secret?

No?

> How did they manage to create CERN?

I have no clue. It appears that was 70 years ago.

> maybe there was no reddit like people commenting back then?

Huh?

The EU is often criticized for its lack of competitiveness due to its highly regulated environment, low investment numbers, risk aversion, and slow moving bureaucracy. This announcement hits all of these points. I am European as well, and it just makes me sad? It is more of the same. This doesn't look like a serious effort to propel Europe to the cutting-edge or even the conversation. It's just enough to say we're doing something, without a high risk of calling it a failure if nothing ends up being delivered.

Europe doesn't lack talent or initiative. If you look at the top AI research institutions out there, a great many of them are composed of researchers who originated from Europe. What is the US offering them that Europe is not? That is many things, none of which are are actively being addressed in the EU. There's a high likelihood that academic beneficiaries of these funds will end up in the US due to the absurd salaries and cutting edge positions.

I prefer the regulated EU environment. I value my privacy and think the EU is doing the right, long-term thing. I don't mind the reduced salaries here -- I worked in the US for years but returned back to Europe because I share its values. But there's no point in pretending the EU will be a serious contender in this environment.

But can I run it on Gaia-X?

This really reads like a parody. Press release, “a consortium of 20 research institutions”, “awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal”. Lots of grandiose self-congratulations. All with nothing to run, download or try of course.

It is. They will do nothing but distribute the EU taxpayers money into their pockets. Unfortunately.

It’s par for the course for this union. It’s just comical given the very recent political events.

In what way? What exactly has the US achieved?

I don’t know. Everything?

Uhhm.. they lead in pretty much everything especially tech related? You redditors are unbearable.

They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries. And soon they’ll be the number one authoritarian state too! And have biggest bestest king of them all lmao.

>They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries.

Except they haven't and lead in all those things mentioned?

Every week new products are released from you guess where: the US. Products used by people all over the world. US is doing pretty great compared to for example Europe. The US is not becoming an authoritarian state. Its a country lead by companies and institutions. Its just a bit clearer now. But its nothing different than 10 years ago

The US is a joke when it comes to things like health care, or labour protections.

I mean in relation to the 'current political events' - which I presume to mean Russia/Ukraine negotiations. You clown.

Europe is moving at the speed of bureaucracy. It's slow, but inexorable.

And honestly, people don't _want_ the European bureaucracy to move fast. Case in point: the USA.

The spending of money is inexorable, but little else is achieved (unless you count blocking productive people).

European projects are often long and ponderous, but they do deliver. There's a long history of state-sponsored academic collaborations, like the venerable CERN.

> , people don't _want_ the European bureaucracy to move fast.

I'm a german and yes i would absolutely want it to move faster. And I guess you are an american?

Ethnically Russian. And the Russian government is (and I'm not joking) quite effective and agile.

You can guess why I prefer a bit more ...gradual... style of governing.

> Press release

https://openai.com/news/company-announcements/

> a consortium of 20 research institutions

https://aimagazine.com/machine-learning/google-invests-in-ai...

> awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal

https://openai.com/index/strengthening-americas-ai-leadershi...

> Lots of grandiose self-congratulations

https://x.com/sama/status/1891533802779910471

> All with nothing to run, download or try of course.

https://openai.com/weights/download/

Maybe you can't download their weights, but you can literally try out their products right from their homepage. What's your point?

OK, if you prefer: https://web.archive.org/web/20151211215507/https://openai.co...

It's normal to announce things long before they're actually available to end users. This is not some unique evil of the EU bureaucracy - if anything, it's very corporate of them.

You just don't get it. When it's announced by the EU, it's red tape PDF crunching soulless bureaucracy wasting our time. When it's said by a glorified CPA of an American unicorn startup it's the vision, innovation and triumph of entrepreneurial spirit.

OpenAI has a real, groundbreaking product.

This has... a statement of intent to try to copy that product. Not remotely the same.

This is about industrial research, not about some product.

Members of the project have previously produced both niche and general models, but without the arrogance and bluster of usian corporate subcultures.

It is not different from any corporate speech, except that this time is for public benefit rather than private, and will proceed much slower. And yes, I don't know why but apparently consortium are named quite often, I'm in compsci in italy and on hpc courses they get named a lot

What I am gonna say here is not a political point but I hope someone can point me the pattern (and some something to read about it) I have observed with for example the EU.

Yes it sounds like a parody or an onion piece. We know the European search engine, cloud, blockchain never got anywhere. I don't even believe that anybody ever really tried.

Now you have to put yourself in their head for 2 minutes and here is what I noticed by knowing a few of them (the "EU type").

In their perception of reality it seems they really believe that if they declare something it is real. This is why they get so deranged if you dare pointing to the facts or just asking questions. It seems they really believe they succeeded in all those projects. I they say it, it exists.

I am not really satisfied by the explanations we usually hear: they are incompetent, it is corruption or even insanity (some sort of mass hysteria that would take root in some institutions).

What I am wondering is, is there a concept in philosophy or some similar pattern in previous civilisation that could help us understand what is going on with the EU?

Because Gaia-X or OpenEuroLLM is one thing, but it is worrisome they now believe they can raise an army and declare war on everybody.

As a European, the sad reality is that I see parallels with the late-stage Soviet Union and its satellite states.

NOT when it comes to the level of violence and repression or quality of living. Those two things are world-class.

But in the sense that there's a more or less unelected political establishment that's

a) Recursive: It does things only to show them off to itself.

b) Not exposed to real-world consequences.

c) Has a non-falsifiable pretense to validate whatever they do and caution against undoing whatever it is. For the soviets, it was anti-capitalism. For the EU it's some notion of safety or sustainability.

d) Inadvertently benefits itself and other elites and harms the people they pretend to protect.

My hope is that as a democratic institution, the EU is capable of reform.

As someone who grew up in late-stage Soviet Union nope. Not even close.

Yeah you are right there is probably no need to look very far ...

Now what worry me is from I understand of the collapse of the Soviet Union (but I might be very wrong) is they kind let things happen and was less aggressive by the end.

On the contrary the EC is now consolidating power rapidly and are getting very aggressive.

well you can only compare the communist party and the EU in those narrow ways I described above, not in its "aggression".

You can't even compare the EC's aggression (pointless regulations) with Soviet ones (no need to elaborate, but it's gruesome).

There's various EU cloud providers. It seems to me it is difficult to compete with these energy prices.

> A series of foundation models for transparent AI in Europe

Am I the only one who doesn't see any link to any model? Too many words, no actual outcome.

I think they've yet to train let alone release any models. This is just a press release about the effort

Starting by misleading? Nice start!

The title should be “effort to train model” or plans, not saying “series”! Series without having even one?

From https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release (3 Feb 2025):

> "The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework...

Not a surprising stance if the project is funded by the people who are responsible for said regulatory framework

I think the intent of highlighting that sentence ('The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework') was to draw attention to the fact that the sponsors will not move fast nor achieve anything of note. To put it more sarcastically, with sponsors like that, who needs others throwing down roadblocks!

To make the regulation even more effective of course

Looks like they started work Feb 1 and haven't made anything yet.

Probably waiting on the editor to find reviewers. So far the editor couldn’t find reviewers with experience in making an open LLM.

The three goals featured prominently above the fold are:

> truly open > including data, documentation, training and testing code, and evaluation metrics; including community involvement

> compliant > under EU regulations, OpenEuroLLM will provide a series of transparent and performant LLMs

> diverse > for European languages and other socially and economically interesting ones, preserving linguistic and cultural diversity

The first one seems good, but the second two seem to be pretty beside the point of creating models that compete with the cutting edge of China and the USA.

Why would diversity, especially linguistic diversity, be besides the point? Europe is a lot more culturally and linguistically diverse than either the USA or China.

Hier spricht man Deutsch.

A 600 km à l'ouest, on parle français.

50 km na wschód, Polska.

360 χλμ βόρεια, Δανέζικα, Σουηδικά; 250 χλμ νότια, Τσεχία; 750 χλμ νοτιοανατολικά, Ουγγρικά; και τα λοιπά.

Europe has a need, that the other models aren't bothered by — they can do it, but more by happenstance than on purpose.

Depends on the goals. If they were fine-tuning leading foundation models, then I could see this being an entirely sensible undertaking. But since their goal seems to be to make foundation models, I don't think that they will end up being the leading models with so many other conflicting requirements.

Of the four languages I speak the different models do a pretty good job. I am sure there is something extra that can be added, but atm it is good enough for me.

That note about EU regulations may also be dangerous. There is an increasing trend of European leaders supporting censorship of speech, on weak justifications like misinformation that are applied very aggressively. There are even videos of police showing up at people’s homes in some countries, over tweets they made. I don’t have faith that these European LLMs will be trustworthy as a result.

Most of the people working on building American LLMs also support such censorship, they just don't have the political power now to achieve it in the US, especially given the first amendment.

Laws against defamation and fraud aren't exactly a new trend, nor are they limited to Europe.

I guess some people are surprised police might get involved in a defamation case because in the US it's not a crime but a civil wrong? Which means you can't get help from the police to identify the person who made a defamatory tweet? Or something?

Then you should also question what flavor of censorship and bias US-made LLMs have.

Also, if someone says something that could threaten my safety (either directly or through inciting others) I would very much like them to get a visit from the police. This situation is so easily avoided by not being a dick to people.

> There are even videos of police showing up at people’s homes in some countries, over tweets they made.

Yeah, if you are from The Netherlands and want police showing up your door, mention on Twitter that you want to shoot mr. Wilders. Threatening someone to take away their life has repercussions. How peculiar!

(Please don't do it. Example is just illustrative. Actually, I know a website with a forum where this happened approx 20 years ago. Server got seized. They didn't log. FDE, but obviously got broken at some point.)

Freedom of speech isn't that you can spout whatever you want and not face repercussions.

Besides that, there's Popper.

Furthermore, there's this thing called chilling effect. You might wanna ask GOP Senators and Congressman about that.

I have faith in LLMs and AI, as long as it is reproducible and transparent. Right now, when I use Mistral, it refers to sources. A step in the right direction.

Compliance and language diversity are important motivations to not just use the existing foreign models.

People on HN complain constantly about "open-source" models not releasing their training data. That's what the second point ("transparent") seems to be alluding to. And that's a bad thing?

Others have responded to your "diversity" point, but making sure to train on adequate amounts of data in all EU languages is valuable, especially because LLMs are so prone to generating convincing BS when working close to the edges of their training set. If this exists, people in Malta are going to want to use it, so better for it to generate good Maltese than gibberish that sort of looks like Maltese, right?

Why bother when there's Mistral which is already open, pretty good and, crucially, exists

Where is the training data and the recipee?

Somebody needs to train those PhDs that Mistral will eventually hire.

Exactly. US commentators here are so tedious.

》under EU regulations, OpenEuroLLM will provide a series of transparent and performant LLMs

What EU relulations? It is a moving target, and nobody knows what exactly apply. It would be nice to provide list of regulations with references. And some testing suite or checklist, to verify AI use actually fits regulations.

Right now, if I integrate spellchecker into my app, I have no idea if I am breaking any AI EU regulations!!!

Don't worry, I would be immensely impressed if they even finish a pretraining run for a competitive model. Let alone get to the stage of doing any kind of fine tuning for any kind of purpose.

Well, perhaps they could take Deepseek, feed it with all EU directives, ask on each if it's related to AI (or whatever) and spill out results.

It could be even nice idea for startup. All data are publicly available...

Here's a summary of what one of the members has done before.

https://www.ai.se/en/ai-labs/natural-language-understanding/...

They've cooperated with a research agency known in part for their Prolog implementation, i.e. they've been at it since the last massive "AI" hype cycle.

Apart from the already mentioned pessimism what matters is if it is great when used with all European languages. It might help break some usual boundaries and allow better RAG between the resources in different countries. English speaking folks take it as granted that everyone uses it in business but that is not the case in Europe. And no US company is interested in solving that provblem.

Most often they don't even need to? I speak a fairly small European language, and bigger models (70B and above) do fine - in fact they do much better than some research projects that are supposed to solve this problem.

It's basically a classic EU research push - first you try to regulate the new technology to oblivion and then, when it becomes apparent that stifles development in the EU you bankroll many different projects with EU grants, often with limited success.

My system uses the OpenAI api for summerizing and translating local language news into English from all EU countries as wel as a few non-EU ones. Works amazingly well.

They also had some search engine announced with similar name like "openeurosearch" or something close to that.

That project too seems dormant lately.

They just announce things and then the train leaves the station.

That was just an Ecosia rebrand, not an official EU thing: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-j...

The official EU "Google alternative" was Quaero (not Qwant which is something else). Announced in 2005 and ended in 2013.

I don't believe anything was ever made public.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

I wish they'd held the press release until there was something to see. There isn't even a hiring link.

Given the rampant cronyism of academia and the government I doubt there will be any open positions to fill.

Nonsense, you don't know what you're talking about.

Rushed it out to respond to the JD Vance speech?

This was announced over two weeks ago: https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release

It's funny they don't have Hugging Face as their Partner. Literally, the biggest face of Open LLMs sitting right in Europe, but somehow it's not a partner.

When you are the front runner, you don't associate with the also-ran and the wannabes. They will drag you down, and drown you in their endless discussion and alignment meetings.

What would you expect HF to provide? Are they in possession of larger supercomputers than the research institutions involved?

Hugging Face is an American start-up, by French people. It resides in Brooklyn, New York. Saying they sit right in Europe is dishonest.

Although, as a Dutch person, I'd like to point out Brooklyn technically is Dutch. ;)

I wish EU programmer wages could be higher via lower taxes instead of funding things like this

Safety and no School shootings, Universal Health Care, Worker Rights, almost free Universities. The USA in the 23th century...

i see this kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism a lot. i think that you can imitate good things about US innovation without having lots of school shootings.

I’m pointing out that overall compensation isn’t just the salary. In Europe, benefits like universal healthcare, free universities, and strong worker rights add significant value that balances lower wages.

Keep telling yourself that buddy.

oh, i see what you meant now. in that case, i retract my accusation of whataboutism. i still really disagree with your argument, but i mischaracterized by mistake, sorry

Somehow doesn't inspire me knowing how "fast" things happen in Europe ...

Given that the second!! goal is to be compliant to EU AI regulations, which are incredibly vague.

How would EU enforce their regulation with an open recipe? Say I take the recipe plus my own data to train a model that has no check of my speech whatsoever, and let my friends use it, wouldn't that violate some regulations of EU?

If I buy some tools and use them to make another, illegal thing, is that illegal? Yes. Isn't that how life works everywhere?

As a European, I hope this is successful but it kinda smells right now. Also, I imagine whatever model they create will be the most censored.

Where is it? Where is code, a model, a repo? If one of our startups in this community put out a press release like this saying they have plans they’d be laughed off HN. Why isn’t the EU held to the same standard?

Because it's a bureaucratic union of 27 countries with goals other than making obscene profits, side-effects be damned?

How can a project be really "truly open", "compliant", and "diverse" if it does not even have contact information on its main page. (It is hidden in the press release.)

This will have the additional challenge of being catered to audiences of other languages.

Honestly, the cynicism in the comments here is extremely disappointing.

EU citizens badly need AI systems that are open and privacy-respecting. Getting together this rather large coalition of experts with quite some money and (importantly) access to compute power is a nice first step.

Let them play around, train some models, fail-and-get-up-again, start over, write papers and hopefully get some useful output. Remember, for the involved PhD students it will also be a learning experience!

Yes, it's only the first step. But yeez, it's a press release indicating the start of a scientific collaboration! Let's hold back on the negativity for a couple of years until after they've had a chance.

I, for one, hope this will lead to success and wish the team the best.

It's not cynism, people feel offended that there's another way to fund projects that via VC money.

> badly need AI systems that are open and privacy-respecting.

There are plenty AI systems that are open and privacy-respecting. In fact, any model you run on your own hardware is privacy-respecting. And open, for whatever that means.

There are tons of open LLMs, if anything it's weird to see euro nationalists fawn at the mouth whenever something calls itself European. Like what does it do better than any other open source LLM?

And you'd see the same reaction if a "OpenMurica" LLM would be announced. It's just weird and cringy to attach patriotism to something like this

Will it only respond with a vacation message from June to September?

The team is currently skiing for two weeks so we'll have to get back to you on that.

just smells really "EU". lots of talk about inclusion, regulations, equality, lot of kissing the ring of institutions. they are cooked aren't they? :(

I don't fully understand the reactions in the comments. It's an announcement of a project that is starting soon-ish, mostly aimed at recruiting students and getting European talent excited, why would you expect them to deliver a model upon announcing the project?

Did you expect OpenAI to release GPT in the press release that announced its creation as a company? Bullshit Silicon Valley startups do big press releases based on literally nothing all the time, but all of a sudden this is an issue if an academic European institution does it?

I hope the post is being bot-raided because otherwise I'll have to accept that the quality of thought on HN has gone down. I get the typical biased US-elitism that is pervasive on this website, but these reactions are just plain dumb.

It's something I've noticed that has started happening on this site whenever the EU is mentioned, especially when LLMs/AI is also mentioned or any kind of regulation. Hacker News is also quite biased against academia in general and, IMO, has always been too obsessed with making money.

I don't think it's (just) bots. I think it's the current strain of Silicon Valley arrogance, not unlike what helped create the current political landscape in America.

Where is the models - I don't care about your "intentions" and your logos - just make and publish the models. This current form is _useless_

From the web site: Open, compliant, diverse, yada yada.

In real life: you either train your LLM on Anna's archive, or get left behind with sub-par model

Compliance is the second most important feature they have to reveal, seriously?

Especially given how notoriously bad are the EU AI regulations.

That website tho..

p̶i̶c̶s̶ model weights or it didn't happen.

Open but to what degree. Not saying that I will but can I generate hate speech with it. If not why not. What about other “deemed illegal by non elected officials” activities?

Funny that it is written by Claude, lightly edited by humans.

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