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Comment by impossiblefork | Hacker News Reader

I think the chips alone are 10B minimum. It'd be way bigger than CERN.

Provided that the systems work, they can at least be repurposed to other things. If the organizations that are to train public LLMs can't do it, we can rent the system out to Mistral or something.

So I think something like 5B, starting with 10B to get started, in public money per year, the chip firms are private, some of the LLM firms will be private, but the system is available to train European LLMs-- that's I think a realistic approach.

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The biggest problem with public money funded endeavours is corruption. At the end of the day most of the people would be there for the pay check and even if nothing is delivered after burning billions of euros, nobody would be held accountable.

That’s why I think it’s not going to be successful with public funding. What EU needs is structural unpopular reforms. Reduce taxes so companies and top talent would have an incentive to choose EU over US. Reform employment laws so people can be fired for being pencil pushers and lacking off. Relax privacy and copyright laws so the data can be used to train the model. Completely repel all laws that create a bureaucratic nightmare for startups. Today all these suggestions would be a complete no go in any European country, but that’s the hard reform EU needs like yesterday even to have a chance to compete against US and China.

Yes, of course people would be working there for the paycheck.

I think there's nothing special about public funding though. The field is so competitive that people will be mad if a competitive model is not achieved, making corruption more damaging to the organizations. There would also be some internal competition. There are after all several EU LLM/AI/etc. firms that would probably try to use this infrastructure.

I think the bigger issue of public funding and corruption, is that usually these contracts are awarded to "friends" with the purpose of 100% mismanaging and stealing as much of the funds.

Well, some risk must be taken, even the risk of such things.

Some sort of alternative must be created, after all, since models are being restricted to the US only.

Yes I agree, I'd only wish there's some way for do this by the book, like its not so hard, Brasil government has produced almost SOTA models, why cant the UE figure shit out? They could even rent hw like everyone else to do the first trainings...

But no, lets make this a 10B deal who someone will suck out 1B out of it even before its shipped

I think the way to do it is this: let EU chip design firms bid. They say what their systems can do, they give their prices, and then we choose the one that can achieve the requirements (pretrain multiple 10T+ models in a reasonable amount of time and then do RL on them) at the lowest cost.

There has to be a deadline and also a penalty if they don’t deliver. That way the company cannot just take the money and pocket it and just say oops, we failed

By paycheck I meant that they get the money through corruption. Like fake bills, bloated estimates and huge commissions, but in the surface it all looks legal and they get away stealing millions of euros of public money of hardworking tax payers.

I guarantee you that maybe people would get mad that no competitive model is achieved because the politicians burned the tax payers money. But there would be no repercussions, nobody would be held accountable and would just be marked as a failed project.

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