AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

This is very interesting, I didn't know that! Thanks for the links!

Then again, if you go to Miranda de Douro, they’ll say the rest of Portugal has been talking nonsense for the last 700 years, so the purists at least always have their concents to retreat to if they so choose.

That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.

It is not towards Brazilians themselves, which I frankly respect, but because of the low quality stuff my kids are exposed to on the internet. You just can’t avoid it and of having the kids gravitate towards YouTube instead of better entertainent channels.

Random dumb YouTubers doing shit for giggles and overly sexualized funk music. And the shorts, oh the shorts crap everywhere, in all languages.

I don’t have a problem with my kids watching “manual do mundo” or “Paula stefania”. Or “porta dos fundos” myself. Good stuff.

On the other hand, Apple developer relations suports Brazilian Portuguese only, when they do not distinguish between variants of English, French and Spanish: I had to submit an English translation of a plain simple and clear document because my Portuguese version was rejected.

It starts by we emigrate all over the place, when something happens to a portuguese abroad due to xenophobic attitudes, it is all over the place on the news, they squeeze the juice until there is no more news to talk about.

Then some folks decide to do exactly the same to others that like us abroad, decide to try their luck in Portugal.

And yes, I have experience what means to be shown that Portuguese aren't welcomed.

Usually only Portugal and Brazil come up in conversations.

In reality the list is wider, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese-speaking_world

African Portuese is also closer in way of speaking to European Portuguese than Brasilian Portuguese, as we also tend to share some common slang that comes in from creole.

There are ~26x more Portuguese speakers worldwide than in Portugal. Only 13x more Spanish speakers worldwide than in Spain. Depending on how you count (English is really widespread as a native-but-second language), there are about 20x more English speakers worldwide than in the UK.

So yes, Portugal has it pretty bad by the numbers.

Nobody is saying you have to swap your culture for English. You can have English as the mandatory language for tech and business across the EU, while still keeping your language and culture for your education, leisure, festivities, art, media, etc. This way everyone is happy. But countries like France would rather detonate its entire nuclear arsenal rather than accepting official use of English on its own soil.

As long as resources are spent across the EU to account for every language and bureaucracy, we'll keep falling behind internationally, and the only winners will be the bureaucrats, notaries, lawyers, consultants, translators, etc. which would be fine if this were preserving culture like you said in the beginning, but it isn't, it's just preserving friction, segmentation and bureaucracy.

We need another Concord moment. What's wild is that Concord was made via international cooperation, before the EU was even a thing. So whatever the EU is doing to improve things, it's either not good, not enough, or not working. I hope this improves but knowing how petty some EU states are about things being done their way, I doubt it.

Training an entire LLM model for each language is going to be incredibly expensive and likely a waste of resources. Keep in mind that all the big LLMs can already speak these languages anyway - this effort is just to make a 'pure' Portuguese LLM.