> 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.
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.
---
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 :).
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].
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:
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"?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
》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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.)
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.
> 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
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.
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…”
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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.
2 replies →
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.
for 1.87m per project, you get in EU rather 15 - 20 people :) (salaries are low here)
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.
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I assume the largest portion will be consumables, travel, meetings etc.
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://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]
[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
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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?
23 replies →
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.
> 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/
OpenAI has a real, groundbreaking product.
This has... a statement of intent to try to copy that product. Not remotely the same.
2 replies →
Maybe you can't download their weights, but you can literally try out their products right from their homepage. What's your point?
2 replies →
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.
3 replies →
There's various EU cloud providers. It seems to me it is difficult to compete with these energy prices.
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
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?
7 replies →
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).
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> , 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?
1 reply →
> 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.
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
2 replies →
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?
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.
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 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.
Compliance and language diversity are important motivations to not just use the existing foreign models.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why bother when there's Mistral which is already open, pretty good and, crucially, exists
Somebody needs to train those PhDs that Mistral will eventually hire.
Exactly. US commentators here are so tedious.
Where is the training data and the recipee?
》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.
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.
Rushed it out to respond to the JD Vance speech?
This was announced over two weeks ago: https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release
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.
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.
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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.
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. ;)
What would you expect HF to provide? Are they in possession of larger supercomputers than the research institutions involved?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
It's not cynism, people feel offended that there's another way to fund projects that via VC money.
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
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.
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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.
Compliance is the second most important feature they have to reveal, seriously?
Especially given how notoriously bad are the EU AI regulations.
p̶i̶c̶s̶ model weights or it didn't happen.
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
That website tho..
just smells really "EU". lots of talk about inclusion, regulations, equality, lot of kissing the ring of institutions. they are cooked aren't they? :(
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_
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If you read what is now the first comment, it says something about a project with similar aim and scope that already achieved some of the points
See, "some of the points", thats a pretty typical tactic... Nope, sorry, have seen too much, dont trust the EU anymore.
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Funny that it is written by Claude, lightly edited by humans.