8 ms·

I'm HIGHLY sceptical. The academics will love it, because they get money. But look at that list of parties involved. More than twenty parties supplying people;

I'm HIGHLY sceptical. The academics will love it, because they get money. But look at that list of parties involved. More than twenty parties supplying people; none of them will have this initiative on the top of their list of loyalties and priorities. Meaning, everyone will talk, noone will take charge, some millions change hands and we continue with business as usual. Instead this should have been a single new non-profit or whatever with deep pockets that convinces smart people to give their 100% for a while. Death by committee. And I say this as someone who was in a multi-million research program across ~8 universities, that was going to do "groundbreaking" research. After a few months everyone was back to pushing their own lines of research, there was almost zero collaboration let alone common language or goal setting.

tmikaeld 2y ago
” The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence.” They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists. I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior. Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - miohtama 2y ago
    The model itself might be useful in the end. But it's terrible industrial policy to kill your startups with regulation and then the state needs to step in, because private companies no longer want to work with you, or no new companies are created.
bayindirh 2y ago
I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail. As a person who's in this type of projects for a long time, what I can say is "it works", because people do not compete with each other, but will build it together. What I can say is, if they have came this far, there's already plans about what to do, and how to do, and none of the parties are inexperienced in these kinds of things.
- ShareTheVista 2y ago
  Can you tell us about a project like this that worked?
  - varjag 2y ago
    The Large Hadron Collider clearly works and is infinitely more complex than yet another language model.
    - closewith 2y ago
      The LHC is comparably complex to LLMs and CERN is a cautionary tale. The web was invented there and yet the vast majority of the subsequent innovation and economic benefit coalesced in the US because the European countries were culturally unable to capitalise on it.
      - varjag 2y ago
        LLMs are not "comparably complex" to LHC, they are perhaps 0.1% of the complexity from engineering POV. By any metric, from system design to physical infrastructure to run them.
        VagabundoP 2y ago
        Yeah the bar to entry for LLM is far far lower. CERN is a scientific marvel.
bboygravity 2y ago
You just described all EU tech subsidies.
FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
> The academics will love it, because they get money. Nice way to frame this.
londons_explore 2y ago
> Death by committee. This is how the EU works. It's the reason the EU has very little innovation compared to the USA.
yread 2y ago
I'm involved with IMI-BIGPICTURE, a similarly sized EU initiative (~70M funding). It's not that bad. Things will take a while to start moving but as long as all the players stay on the same page shit will get done. 10x slower than with a small team but some things can't be done in small teams
- closewith 2y ago
  > The project aims to create a repository of digital copies of around 3 million slides covering a range of disease areas. This repository will then be used to develop artificial intelligence tools that could aid in the analysis of slides. €70 MM to get the digital copies of 3 million slides. Speaks for itself.
raffraffraff 2y ago
Can't talk specifics but I worked with a perpetually failing startup that spun out of a very prestigious university. The company was lined with way too many professors. Their burn rate must have been incredible, based on the huge investments they got. Their product was already "meh" before the AI boom made it utterly obsolete. They made huge promises but delivered poor results (in an area where 90% accuracy was basically useless). They never seemed to iterate on the product. Suddenly (like almost overnight) we got word that they were out of money and were likely to cease operating. At the 11th hour some idiot bailed them out, likely because of their academic credentials. (Certainly not because of their IP, product or output capability). Or maybe it was sunken cost fallacy. Idk. Anyway, they're still failing along, burning through a seemingly infinite runway. Academia FTW!
rhubarbtree 2y ago
Ah, so you’ve been an academic before, then. The problem is academic culture is corrupt, and it’s very hard to reverse the decay. Simple example: one Russell Group UK university (like many others) was admitting students who couldn’t speak English. A lecturer on a technical subject found they were struggling to understand his course, in part due to the language barrier. Come the exam, most of the students failed. He was told to make the exam easier so they would pass. The lecturer involved is a well meaning kindly man who would consider himself very ethical. But he did what he was told and the students passed. In such a system it’s hard to see how an individual can fix it. If he had protested, he’d have been gently moved aside and the exam would have been rewritten by someone else. Research is similarly corrupt. Grants are written to match a call, and they promise the earth. Friends review them and score highly. Pals on the grant committee favour their friends. And it’s implicitly agreed that the outcomes don’t have to be achieved. You go back to doing your original research, or not doing much at all, or more likely figuring out how to get some papers published and writing more grant proposals. The idealistic, actually interested in progressing the field, leave or are squeezed out, looked over for lectureships in favour of folks who bring in grants via bs and politics. Choose a topic you know about. Go on the EPSRC website. Look at grants ten years ago and see what their promised outcomes were. My only answer is that a project like this must be done by people hired from outside of academia, which at this point is probably corrupt beyond repair. I look back at previous generations and wonder how the hell so much advancement was achieved.
rcarmo 2y ago
As someone who worked in several Eurescom research projects back in the early 90s and watched it all get steamrolled by actual pragmatic work done in telcos and US manufacturers, I have zero faith in this even as a political/independence gesture. There are loads of people who think "there is no moat and Europe can do this" (including the Portuguese government, which announced a Portuguese LLM at WebSummit--which, hilariously, is being trained on a research "supercomputer" in Spain), and they have no idea how far (politically, economically and pragmatically) Europe's tech scene is from the US. Other than Mistral, of course.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tmikaeld 2y ago

” The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence.” They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.

bayindirh 2y ago
> They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists. I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior. Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- miohtama 2y ago
  The model itself might be useful in the end. But it's terrible industrial policy to kill your startups with regulation and then the state needs to step in, because private companies no longer want to work with you, or no new companies are created.

bayindirh 2y ago

I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail. As a person who's in this type of projects for a long time, what I can say is "it works", because people do not compete with each other, but will build it together. What I can say is, if they have came this far, there's already plans about what to do, and how to do, and none of the parties are inexperienced in these kinds of things.

ShareTheVista 2y ago
Can you tell us about a project like this that worked?
- varjag 2y ago
  The Large Hadron Collider clearly works and is infinitely more complex than yet another language model.
  - closewith 2y ago
    The LHC is comparably complex to LLMs and CERN is a cautionary tale. The web was invented there and yet the vast majority of the subsequent innovation and economic benefit coalesced in the US because the European countries were culturally unable to capitalise on it.
    - varjag 2y ago
      LLMs are not "comparably complex" to LHC, they are perhaps 0.1% of the complexity from engineering POV. By any metric, from system design to physical infrastructure to run them.
      - VagabundoP 2y ago
        Yeah the bar to entry for LLM is far far lower. CERN is a scientific marvel.

bboygravity 2y ago

You just described all EU tech subsidies.

FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago

> The academics will love it, because they get money. Nice way to frame this.

londons_explore 2y ago

> Death by committee. This is how the EU works. It's the reason the EU has very little innovation compared to the USA.

yread 2y ago

I'm involved with IMI-BIGPICTURE, a similarly sized EU initiative (~70M funding). It's not that bad. Things will take a while to start moving but as long as all the players stay on the same page shit will get done. 10x slower than with a small team but some things can't be done in small teams

closewith 2y ago
> The project aims to create a repository of digital copies of around 3 million slides covering a range of disease areas. This repository will then be used to develop artificial intelligence tools that could aid in the analysis of slides. €70 MM to get the digital copies of 3 million slides. Speaks for itself.

raffraffraff 2y ago

Can't talk specifics but I worked with a perpetually failing startup that spun out of a very prestigious university. The company was lined with way too many professors. Their burn rate must have been incredible, based on the huge investments they got. Their product was already "meh" before the AI boom made it utterly obsolete. They made huge promises but delivered poor results (in an area where 90% accuracy was basically useless). They never seemed to iterate on the product. Suddenly (like almost overnight) we got word that they were out of money and were likely to cease operating. At the 11th hour some idiot bailed them out, likely because of their academic credentials. (Certainly not because of their IP, product or output capability). Or maybe it was sunken cost fallacy. Idk. Anyway, they're still failing along, burning through a seemingly infinite runway. Academia FTW!

rhubarbtree 2y ago

Ah, so you’ve been an academic before, then. The problem is academic culture is corrupt, and it’s very hard to reverse the decay. Simple example: one Russell Group UK university (like many others) was admitting students who couldn’t speak English. A lecturer on a technical subject found they were struggling to understand his course, in part due to the language barrier. Come the exam, most of the students failed. He was told to make the exam easier so they would pass. The lecturer involved is a well meaning kindly man who would consider himself very ethical. But he did what he was told and the students passed. In such a system it’s hard to see how an individual can fix it. If he had protested, he’d have been gently moved aside and the exam would have been rewritten by someone else. Research is similarly corrupt. Grants are written to match a call, and they promise the earth. Friends review them and score highly. Pals on the grant committee favour their friends. And it’s implicitly agreed that the outcomes don’t have to be achieved. You go back to doing your original research, or not doing much at all, or more likely figuring out how to get some papers published and writing more grant proposals. The idealistic, actually interested in progressing the field, leave or are squeezed out, looked over for lectureships in favour of folks who bring in grants via bs and politics. Choose a topic you know about. Go on the EPSRC website. Look at grants ten years ago and see what their promised outcomes were. My only answer is that a project like this must be done by people hired from outside of academia, which at this point is probably corrupt beyond repair. I look back at previous generations and wonder how the hell so much advancement was achieved.

rcarmo 2y ago

As someone who worked in several Eurescom research projects back in the early 90s and watched it all get steamrolled by actual pragmatic work done in telcos and US manufacturers, I have zero faith in this even as a political/independence gesture. There are loads of people who think "there is no moat and Europe can do this" (including the Portuguese government, which announced a Portuguese LLM at WebSummit--which, hilariously, is being trained on a research "supercomputer" in Spain), and they have no idea how far (politically, economically and pragmatically) Europe's tech scene is from the US. Other than Mistral, of course.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]