Comment by jpdus
18 days ago
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 wish you the best of luck. However, this is basically a still just a European joint research project (admittedly compatibly well funded) with similar partners that have been also connected before in other research projects. To really compete in the space it will require new ideas, great talent and good leadership towards a common goal. I have myself been part of many EU funded projects and know the difficulty of realizing this within such a project. Public funding sadly has adversarial effects sometimes.
As for computing cost: as EuroHPC gives resources to research for free there can be more budget for computing. The EuroHPC joint undertaking has just decided to invest hundreds of millions of Euro in new AI clusters and supporting services. So this can come on top. Actually projects like this are much needed to also make good use of the money.
Disclaimer: my lab is involved in one of the new AI Factories.
So, if one has a well thought-through idea, what is the process of getting the resources ($$$) from OpenEuroLLM and the compute from EuroHPC? How do I become a partner as a long-standing engineer with plenty of industry practice in research and development?
I am asking this because I never really understood how EU funds are working, they always seemed to me as there's a lot of gate keeping.
There definitely is - but that we, as a startup that is barely a year old and not widely known outside our niche in AI dev circles and on Huggingface, are part of this is already a sign that times are changing.
To be fair: We probably couldn't have handled the paperwork without LLM´s - but due to this technology, the process was still long and involved but manageable.
(BTW: We´re hiring, if you really want to work on this ;-). As a freelancer/solo entrepreneur this will be difficult though..)
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Applying for EC Projects is a complicated game. For SMEs there is typically Open Calls like this: https://www.ffplus-project.eu/
Regarding compute simply file an application here: https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/access-our-supercomputers/euroh...
The data analytics and AI call is currently not open but the AI factories will start in April, so there will be compute.
If you have questions don't hesitate to contact me as I will have to do commuty management for HammerHAI
The problem is that: - These are not really super computing cluster in LLM terms. Leonardo is a 250 PFlops cluster. That is really not much at all. - If people in charge of this project actually believe R1 costs $5.5M to build from scratch, it's already over.
I think no one believes that R1 costs $5.5m from scratch. People in this project (most, not all) are very aware of the realities in training and are very well connected in the US as well. Besides Leonardo there are JUWELS, LUMI & other which can be used for ablations and so on.
This will never compete with what the frontier labs have (+ are building) but might be just enough for something, that is close enough to be a useful alternative :).
PS: Huge fan of Latent Space :)
what are you all talking about? most people in the industry do believe the publicly stated numbers for dsv3
> If people in charge of this project actually believe R1 costs $5.5M to build from scratch, it's already over.
wdym?
The money doesn’t matter.
The goals don’t matter.
The people don’t matter.
The only thing that matters is how much regulatory red tape is involved.
My guess is that the paperwork will kill this. Read the announcement. Too much discussion about regulatory framework. In the US or China, all you need is some money and smart people. That’s a very low barrier to getting moving forward.
In other words, to be successful you need to be able to break the law and lobby the government? That is indeed the USA mindset, or should I say United Corporations of America? I'm happy EU is not USA.
That’s absolutely asinine and not at all what I said.
The EU over regulates things like tech and that why they won’t be successful at have an AI tech scene. Over time, anyone good will migrate to the US or China where they can work faster and not have as many rules to deal with.
A simple example is hiring and firing people - it’s much easier to make personnel changes in the US than Europe. As a result, US companies can take more risks.
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I agree that the announcement should´ve talked more about goals and performance than regulatory stuff ;-).
But I think there is a new understanding among the bureaucracy that regulation (alone, without innovation) will kill Europe´s competitiveness and that some acceleration and cutting of red tape is necessary.
Can't say with certainty that this will be successful. But that we, as a very young startup that is barely known outside of our AI Open Source niche, are part of this, is already a sign in itself - a year ago I´d have never believed that this might be an option (and also probably would've declined if someone asked us to join a EU-funded project).
We will have engineers without a degree (but hundreds of thousands of HF downloads) working side-by-side with some of the top researchers + HPC centers.
I wish the effort well. Any change is welcome.
> China, all you need is some money and smart people
No way
What I don't understand is the big plan. Say, you manage bring about something that works in the lab on par with DeepSeek R1. What happens with it next? In the market LLMs are being improved continuously based on feedback - in terms of usage data etc. and new versions are being released multiple times a year. If we want to stay sovereign, we need a similar engine started in Europe, but I can't see how a research project relying on a walled garden system of supercomputer centres can start it.
What route(s) did you go through for funding? As an outsider the bureaucracy fascinates me, I trust it's all open and transparent like the EU?
> Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources
is that a new take? cause so far deepseek was considered as proof for small companies being able to compete with big players like openai ...
might be debatable - but I tend to agree with Dario Amodei on this; my guess is that R1 is 7-10 months behind the internal frontier at the big labs, while having a few small novel tricks. (But i might err, will be interesting to see the development going forward)
the main narrative so far was that deepseek was cheaper and better than llms by openai.