9 ms·

OpenEuroLLM

304 points by richardfontana 2y ago

qoez 2y ago
I wish EU programmer wages could be higher via lower taxes instead of funding things like this
- belter 2y ago
  Safety and no School shootings, Universal Health Care, Worker Rights, almost free Universities. The USA in the 23th century...
  - sdsd 2y ago
    i see this kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism 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.
    - belter 2y ago
      I’m pointing out that overall compensation isn’t just the salary. In Europe, benefits like universal healthcare, free universities, and strong worker rights add significant value that balances lower wages.
      - piker 2y ago
        Keep telling yourself that buddy.
      - sdsd 2y ago
        oh, i see what you meant now. in that case, i retract my accusation of whataboutism. i still really disagree with your argument, but i mischaracterized by mistake, sorry
Oras 2y ago
> 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.
- artninja1988 2y ago
  I think they've yet to train let alone release any models. This is just a press release about the effort
  - Oras 2y ago
    Starting by misleading? Nice start! The title should be “effort to train model” or plans, not saying “series”! Series without having even one?
- davidcollantes 2y ago
  From https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release (3 Feb 2025): > "The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework...
  - huijzer 2y ago
    Not a surprising stance if the project is funded by the people who are responsible for said regulatory framework
    - eej71 2y ago
      I think the intent of highlighting that sentence ('The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework') was to draw attention to the fact that the sponsors will not move fast nor achieve anything of note. To put it more sarcastically, with sponsors like that, who needs others throwing down roadblocks!
    - enbugger 2y ago
      To make the regulation even more effective of course
dkyc 2y ago
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.
- menaerus 2y ago
  It is. They will do nothing but distribute the EU taxpayers money into their pockets. Unfortunately.
- Argonaut998 2y ago
  It’s par for the course for this union. It’s just comical given the very recent political events.
  - anonymousDan 2y ago
    In what way? What exactly has the US achieved?
    - kandesbunzler 2y ago
      Uhhm.. they lead in pretty much everything especially tech related? You redditors are unbearable.
      - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
        They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries. And soon they’ll be the number one authoritarian state too! And have biggest bestest king of them all lmao.
        kandesbunzler 2y ago
        >They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries. Except they haven't and lead in all those things mentioned?
dmacedo 2y ago
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 https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release
- picafrost 2y ago
  This is classic EU. An announcement of an effort to collect collaborators to discuss doing something that they might do in the future.
  - simion314 2y ago
    >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?
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      No, but collaboration comes with a cost too. As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate. But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling
      - simion314 2y ago
        So CERN and similar? you think it could have been done without any coordonation? Like 2 guys faking under they make it USA style ?
        wahnfrieden 2y ago
        They mistake transparency for performativity, and secrecy for practicality
jdthedisciple 2y ago
Somehow doesn't inspire me knowing how "fast" things happen in Europe ...
- egorfine 2y ago
  Given that the second!! goal is to be compliant to EU AI regulations, which are incredibly vague.
simplecto 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 - Feb 2025 (279 comments)
woah 2y ago
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.
- ben_w 2y ago
  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.
  - woah 2y ago
    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.
  - pastage 2y ago
    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.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  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.
cherryteastain 2y ago
Why bother when there's Mistral which is already open, pretty good and, crucially, exists
- speedgoose 2y ago
  Where is the training data and the recipee?
- MLENG 2y ago
  Somebody needs to train those PhDs that Mistral will eventually hire.
  - anonymousDan 2y ago
    Exactly. US commentators here are so tedious.
hintymad 2y ago
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?
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  If I buy some tools and use them to make another, illegal thing, is that illegal? Yes. Isn't that how life works everywhere?
throw8383848 2y ago
》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!!!
- MLENG 2y ago
  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.
  - throw8383848 2y ago
    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...
  - cess11 2y ago
    Here's a summary of what one of the members has done before. https://www.ai.se/en/ai-labs/natural-language-understanding/models-resources 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.
sameermanek 2y ago
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.
- rafram 2y ago
  That was just an Ecosia rebrand, not an official EU thing: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/ https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-j...
  - sunshine-o 2y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
veggieroll 2y ago
p̶i̶c̶s̶ model weights or it didn't happen.
Archelaos 2y ago
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.)
seydor 2y ago
> 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.
- huijzer 2y ago
  > 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.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Thank goodness we have startup culture in the US, instead we can have “looks bad, doesn’t work, but Microsoft bought it so…”
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      and "actively erodes human community and democratic society"
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        That's the ones that don't get bought. Unicorns are carnivores that prey on the people.
    - aubanel 2y ago
      Microsoft is certainly much better at judging the value of a software than any european administration.
sergiotapia 2y ago
just smells really "EU". lots of talk about inclusion, regulations, equality, lot of kissing the ring of institutions. they are cooked aren't they? :(
transcriptase 2y ago
Will it only respond with a vacation message from June to September?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gillesjacobs 2y ago
  The team is currently skiing for two weeks so we'll have to get back to you on that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
harvey9 2y ago
I wish they'd held the press release until there was something to see. There isn't even a hiring link.
- jisnsm 2y ago
  Given the rampant cronyism of academia and the government I doubt there will be any open positions to fill.
  - jmmcd 2y ago
    Nonsense, you don't know what you're talking about.
- schnable 2y ago
  Rushed it out to respond to the JD Vance speech?
  - layer8 2y ago
    This was announced over two weeks ago: https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Funny that it is written by Claude, lightly edited by humans.
jpdus 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42924802
- acka 2y ago
  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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119913 [1] https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm [2] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B [3] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B
mmaunder 2y ago
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?
- papertokyo 2y ago
  Because it's a bureaucratic union of 27 countries with goals other than making obscene profits, side-effects be damned?
istrice 2y ago
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.
- simongray 2y ago
  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.
  - twice_throwaway 2y ago
    [flagged]
gardenhedge 2y ago
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.
mrshu 2y ago
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 https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b 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"? [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andre-martins-31476745_ai-artificialintelligence-openlanguagemodels-activity-7292215869395394560-Msbl https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andre-martins-31476745_ai-art...
- olejorgenb 2y ago
  Homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm 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
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    Results don't seem that bad for 9b https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b
    - belter 2y ago
      "...EuroLLM-9B was trained on approximately 4 trillion tokens, using 400 Nvidia H100 GPUs on the MareNostrum5 supercomputer..."
      - amarcheschi 2y ago
simplro6 2y ago
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
amrrs 2y ago
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.
- DocTomoe 2y ago
  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.
- cess11 2y ago
  What would you expect HF to provide? Are they in possession of larger supercomputers than the research institutions involved?
- Fnoord 2y ago
  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. ;)
lynx97 2y ago
[flagged]
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  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
  - lynx97 2y ago
    See, "some of the points", thats a pretty typical tactic... Nope, sorry, have seen too much, dont trust the EU anymore.
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      You said you would be surprised if it delivered something, a similar project delivered[1] and now you're moving the goalpost. And the results of the other projects are quite good [2]. I get that europe feels like a bloated group of countries with nothing in common, but at least sometimes good things come out [1] https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home [2] https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/63f33ecc0be81bdc5d903466/ob_1sLM8c7dxuwpv6AAHA.png https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/63f33e...
sublimefire 2y ago
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.
- SirHumphrey 2y ago
  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.
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  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.
itcrowd 2y ago
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.
- kubb 2y ago
  It's not cynism, people feel offended that there's another way to fund projects that via VC money.
- egorfine 2y ago
  > 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.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  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
m3kw9 2y ago
That website tho..
nashashmi 2y ago
This will have the additional challenge of being catered to audiences of other languages.
opentokix 2y ago
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_
egorfine 2y ago
Compliance is the second most important feature they have to reveal, seriously? Especially given how notoriously bad are the EU AI regulations.
pinoy420 2y ago
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?

qoez 2y ago

I wish EU programmer wages could be higher via lower taxes instead of funding things like this

belter 2y ago
Safety and no School shootings, Universal Health Care, Worker Rights, almost free Universities. The USA in the 23th century...
- sdsd 2y ago
  i see this kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism 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.
  - belter 2y ago
    I’m pointing out that overall compensation isn’t just the salary. In Europe, benefits like universal healthcare, free universities, and strong worker rights add significant value that balances lower wages.
    - piker 2y ago
      Keep telling yourself that buddy.
    - sdsd 2y ago
      oh, i see what you meant now. in that case, i retract my accusation of whataboutism. i still really disagree with your argument, but i mischaracterized by mistake, sorry

Oras 2y ago

> 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.

artninja1988 2y ago
I think they've yet to train let alone release any models. This is just a press release about the effort
- Oras 2y ago
  Starting by misleading? Nice start! The title should be “effort to train model” or plans, not saying “series”! Series without having even one?
davidcollantes 2y ago
From https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release (3 Feb 2025): > "The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework...
- huijzer 2y ago
  Not a surprising stance if the project is funded by the people who are responsible for said regulatory framework
  - eej71 2y ago
    I think the intent of highlighting that sentence ('The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework') was to draw attention to the fact that the sponsors will not move fast nor achieve anything of note. To put it more sarcastically, with sponsors like that, who needs others throwing down roadblocks!
  - enbugger 2y ago
    To make the regulation even more effective of course

dkyc 2y ago

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.

menaerus 2y ago
It is. They will do nothing but distribute the EU taxpayers money into their pockets. Unfortunately.
Argonaut998 2y ago
It’s par for the course for this union. It’s just comical given the very recent political events.
- anonymousDan 2y ago
  In what way? What exactly has the US achieved?
  - kandesbunzler 2y ago
    Uhhm.. they lead in pretty much everything especially tech related? You redditors are unbearable.
    - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
      They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries. And soon they’ll be the number one authoritarian state too! And have biggest bestest king of them all lmao.
      - kandesbunzler 2y ago
        >They also lead in destroying your own country and science and tech industries. Except they haven't and lead in all those things mentioned?

dmacedo 2y ago

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 https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release

picafrost 2y ago
This is classic EU. An announcement of an effort to collect collaborators to discuss doing something that they might do in the future.
- simion314 2y ago
  >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?
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    No, but collaboration comes with a cost too. As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate. But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling
    - simion314 2y ago
      So CERN and similar? you think it could have been done without any coordonation? Like 2 guys faking under they make it USA style ?
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        They mistake transparency for performativity, and secrecy for practicality

jdthedisciple 2y ago

Somehow doesn't inspire me knowing how "fast" things happen in Europe ...

egorfine 2y ago
Given that the second!! goal is to be compliant to EU AI regulations, which are incredibly vague.

simplecto 2y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989 - Feb 2025 (279 comments)

woah 2y ago

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.

ben_w 2y ago
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.
- woah 2y ago
  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.
- pastage 2y ago
  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.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
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.

cherryteastain 2y ago

Why bother when there's Mistral which is already open, pretty good and, crucially, exists

speedgoose 2y ago
Where is the training data and the recipee?
MLENG 2y ago
Somebody needs to train those PhDs that Mistral will eventually hire.
- anonymousDan 2y ago
  Exactly. US commentators here are so tedious.

hintymad 2y ago

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?

actionfromafar 2y ago
If I buy some tools and use them to make another, illegal thing, is that illegal? Yes. Isn't that how life works everywhere?

throw8383848 2y ago

》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!!!

MLENG 2y ago
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.
- throw8383848 2y ago
  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...
- cess11 2y ago
  Here's a summary of what one of the members has done before. https://www.ai.se/en/ai-labs/natural-language-understanding/models-resources 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.

sameermanek 2y ago

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.

rafram 2y ago
That was just an Ecosia rebrand, not an official EU thing: https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/ https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-j...
- sunshine-o 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

veggieroll 2y ago

p̶i̶c̶s̶ model weights or it didn't happen.

Archelaos 2y ago

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.)

seydor 2y ago

> 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.

huijzer 2y ago
> 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.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Thank goodness we have startup culture in the US, instead we can have “looks bad, doesn’t work, but Microsoft bought it so…”
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    and "actively erodes human community and democratic society"
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      That's the ones that don't get bought. Unicorns are carnivores that prey on the people.
  - aubanel 2y ago
    Microsoft is certainly much better at judging the value of a software than any european administration.

sergiotapia 2y ago

just smells really "EU". lots of talk about inclusion, regulations, equality, lot of kissing the ring of institutions. they are cooked aren't they? :(

transcriptase 2y ago

Will it only respond with a vacation message from June to September?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gillesjacobs 2y ago
The team is currently skiing for two weeks so we'll have to get back to you on that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

harvey9 2y ago

I wish they'd held the press release until there was something to see. There isn't even a hiring link.

jisnsm 2y ago
Given the rampant cronyism of academia and the government I doubt there will be any open positions to fill.
- jmmcd 2y ago
  Nonsense, you don't know what you're talking about.
schnable 2y ago
Rushed it out to respond to the JD Vance speech?
- layer8 2y ago
  This was announced over two weeks ago: https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release https://openeurollm.eu/launch-press-release

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Funny that it is written by Claude, lightly edited by humans.

jpdus 2y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42924802

acka 2y ago
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119913 [1] https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm [2] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-9B [3] https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B https://huggingface.co/utter-project/EuroLLM-1.7B

mmaunder 2y ago

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?

papertokyo 2y ago
Because it's a bureaucratic union of 27 countries with goals other than making obscene profits, side-effects be damned?

istrice 2y ago

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.

simongray 2y ago
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.
- twice_throwaway 2y ago
  [flagged]

gardenhedge 2y ago

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.

mrshu 2y ago

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 https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b 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"? [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andre-martins-31476745_ai-artificialintelligence-openlanguagemodels-activity-7292215869395394560-Msbl https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andre-martins-31476745_ai-art...

olejorgenb 2y ago
Homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm 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
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  Results don't seem that bad for 9b https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b https://huggingface.co/blog/eurollm-team/eurollm-9b
  - belter 2y ago
    "...EuroLLM-9B was trained on approximately 4 trillion tokens, using 400 Nvidia H100 GPUs on the MareNostrum5 supercomputer..."
    - amarcheschi 2y ago

simplro6 2y ago

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

amrrs 2y ago

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.

DocTomoe 2y ago
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.
cess11 2y ago
What would you expect HF to provide? Are they in possession of larger supercomputers than the research institutions involved?
Fnoord 2y ago
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. ;)

lynx97 2y ago

[flagged]

amarcheschi 2y ago
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
- lynx97 2y ago
  See, "some of the points", thats a pretty typical tactic... Nope, sorry, have seen too much, dont trust the EU anymore.
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    You said you would be surprised if it delivered something, a similar project delivered[1] and now you're moving the goalpost. And the results of the other projects are quite good [2]. I get that europe feels like a bloated group of countries with nothing in common, but at least sometimes good things come out [1] https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home [2] https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/63f33ecc0be81bdc5d903466/ob_1sLM8c7dxuwpv6AAHA.png https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/63f33e...

sublimefire 2y ago

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.

SirHumphrey 2y ago
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.
PeterStuer 2y ago
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.

itcrowd 2y ago

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.

kubb 2y ago
It's not cynism, people feel offended that there's another way to fund projects that via VC money.
egorfine 2y ago
> 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.
mardifoufs 2y ago
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

m3kw9 2y ago

That website tho..

nashashmi 2y ago

This will have the additional challenge of being catered to audiences of other languages.

opentokix 2y ago

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_

egorfine 2y ago

Compliance is the second most important feature they have to reveal, seriously? Especially given how notoriously bad are the EU AI regulations.

pinoy420 2y ago

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?