I feel that not only is Europe losing its independence to the US and China, but it does not even try to take part in the race.
Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.
Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546
So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.
> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs.
Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".
And if you ask a bit more, you'll find that those same people are very likely to daily-drive AI models, desktop and phone operating systems and various other software critical to their professional and personal lives from US companies. And buy tons of Chinese products over Chinese or US e-commerce platforms.
What people say matters much less than what they do.
You are saying that as if China or the US are completely isolated from the EU.
We live in a globalized world whether you like it or not, and every supply chain spans multiple countries.
Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing
Europe decided to regulate the hell out of foreign AI instead of investing in their own systems. It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem (no decent search engines, social networks, cloud, mobile OS) and now it seems to be hellbent in losing this battle.
>It's sad to see the European continent lost the race to create a decent startup ecosystem
What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photos.
Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined
Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.
I think much of that is because European customers (both private and business) tended to prefer American suppliers over suppliers from European countries that were not their own. That may have something to do with most people in IT being quite fluent in English, while European products were all-to-often half-heartedly translated from German/French/Spanish/Polish/Italian/Ukranian.
In many cases, well-established and well-liked European services have been supplanted by American counterparts that came later and were not really better in any way. They did usually have much more money to burn though, undercutting pricing until competition was dead.
I'm speaking in the past tense, because now for the first time in the couple of decades I can remember, there seems to be a somewhat commonly held preference for European suppliers.
Not surprising. All the Yandex people that moved over to here to the Netherlands that I know of are astounded about the insane difference in the tax burden between what they had in Russia and what they have in Western Europe (when their 5 year tax discount ends, that is). If the government takes the bulk of your income after a certain point, there isn't really that big of a push to create ground-breaking technology.
I'll play devil's advocate a little bit - I'm not sure it is losing its "independence" by not taking part in the race. It could very well be that it is gaining independence from tech and choosing a "second mover advantage" to decide how it gets deployed after seeing how it impacts everyone else. Let the US and China experiment on the bleeding edge (and their citizens feel the effect, both good and bad), and then be picky about how you use it.
I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.
I don't understand countries (especially governments) wanting to have their own models when there are already pretty solid open source (weights) models out there.
Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running.
What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?
Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.
This gets better short-term results for a fraction of the cost, for sure, but what do you when China places an export control banning the release of open weight models? If you don't have your own talent, you're then relegated to using a base model from 2026 or whatever the cutoff date is, forever. That defeats the purpose of a 'sovereign' model made for and by your people.
>Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening
Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, and EU Green eco-communists and NIMBVYs don't want to have data centers built in their backyard, so the only way left for EU consultancies to milk taxpayer money for the AI bubble, is shipping a sovereign AI model for each country/language.
Watch out US tech sector, we're coming for you. Feel our wrath.
EU bureaucrats are too busy trying to keep the welfare/pension system from collapsing, defeating Russia, supporting Ukraine, managing the fossil fuels energy shortages, figuring out how to nerf Chinese EVs while supporting domestic car companies, and restricting social media free speech to make sure the "far right" don't win elections.
So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priority list.
Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make?
ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.
And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.
So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.
@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?
And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.
And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.
Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.
Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.
Interesting that this got posted now: the project is receiving increasingly more skepticism lately in the Dutch tech scene [0], and I think that’s fully justified.
What is the exact skepticism? The only thing I could get from that was from some "tech entrepreneur":
> GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.”
That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to start with something, then ramp up, rather do what only a select few labs been able to do, start with really big models. Especially if you're resource constrained, which since this is a government project, I really hope for the sake of the tax payers it was.
TNO is something like semi-DARPA. It gets a lot of stuff tax free and a lot of gov funding, but a lot of their budget is from getting businesses to hire their R&D teams.
They do really good R&D on a lot of stuff. This is just their attempt at public credibility/internal skill building to enter the LLM business.
Doubt its going to be successful, but they "waste" a lot more money on other things that you never heard of. Its not fraud, its just R&D dressed up a little too much too early.
Common approach I've seen is having workflows with paid/larger/hosted models for some workflow where you don't quite know exactly how it'll be when you first put it together, then with time you've locked down how things more or less work yet you still need free-form text parsing of some kind, so you end up replacing the bigger models with carefully post-trained small models.
Besides that, there is a ton of use cases for smaller models for a bunch of different things. We'll be unlikely to be able to run LLMs (actually Large) on smartphones for a while, while the smaller LLMs seem to run already on-device in experiments.
They’re building a competitive-quality model, from scratch, with fair compensation to content owners, for €13.5 million? Something’s wrong with this picture.
This is not an open source model. In that sense I think the sovereign claim is a bit strange. It's the data providers that determine access to the model.
I'm making a Dutch dictionary and would be interested to see how this model would fair in evals vs non specialized ones. I've tested a variety of models for https://hetnederlands.com content and differences can be big
I really think countries should build a sovereign _ecosystem_ and sovereign models are an excuse to achieve it.
An ecosystem is the tribal knowledge, revolving door of talent, known processes etc.
If the end goal is to make a half assed Dutch speaking model, I think it won’t cut it. I don’t see anyone using it over Gemma 4b that runs on my laptop.
An ecosystem is more durable and has desirable second order effects.
Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs. I don't expect hundreds of billions of Euros to be poured into long-shot projects.
Unlike China, Europe has neither cohesive public investment at the global level nor the drive to grow. Long-term investments have a lot of words, a lot of regulations, a lot of proxy goals, but there is neither a lot of money nor urgency. It was captured by this post: https://x.com/piotrsankowski/status/2065795919623438546
So yeah, both in economy and warfare, Europe dooms itself to be in the hands of the US, China, or a mix of both.
Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".
At the same time, it made in many cases EU dependent on the US. A lot of governments are basically dependent on MS Office or Google Cloud.
With AI, it is even more strategic.
What people say matters much less than what they do.
Arguably, staying out of the AI "race" is a good thing
What's ironic and sad at the same time is that pre-2022 Russia's Yandex(domestic Russian variant of Google) was lightyears ahead of what EU, a significantly richer and more capable block, had. IIRC, their reverse image search was so good, they had to nerf it because people were using it to find the identity of people from photos.
Same for Israel, their tech sector is probably greater than the EU one combined
Absolutely shameful how the EU kept managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over.
In many cases, well-established and well-liked European services have been supplanted by American counterparts that came later and were not really better in any way. They did usually have much more money to burn though, undercutting pricing until competition was dead.
I'm speaking in the past tense, because now for the first time in the couple of decades I can remember, there seems to be a somewhat commonly held preference for European suppliers.
I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.
Regulations are not even throughout each of the 27 member states. Each country is relatively small in the world stage.
Until EU progresses towards federalization, discussing this is a moot point.
Countries should want control over _where_ the compute is happening rather than _what code_ is running.
What's wrong with a country hosting a Kimi, Qwen or GPT-Oss on their hardware for their government work purpose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
Yeah but Europe doesn't build any computer hardware, and EU Green eco-communists and NIMBVYs don't want to have data centers built in their backyard, so the only way left for EU consultancies to milk taxpayer money for the AI bubble, is shipping a sovereign AI model for each country/language.
Watch out US tech sector, we're coming for you. Feel our wrath.
Well, then this is will be a good start.
So of course, semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty is very low on their priority list.
Ignorant comment
ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.
And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.
So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.
@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?
And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.
And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.
Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.
Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.
[0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...
> GPT-NL was never built to compete with Claude or ChatGPT. It was trained exclusively on licensed data, and is intended more for governments and companies where privacy and compliance matter more than raw performance.”
That's it? That it didn't aim to compete with SOTA models? Maybe this is something you have to start with something, then ramp up, rather do what only a select few labs been able to do, start with really big models. Especially if you're resource constrained, which since this is a government project, I really hope for the sake of the tax payers it was.
They do really good R&D on a lot of stuff. This is just their attempt at public credibility/internal skill building to enter the LLM business.
Doubt its going to be successful, but they "waste" a lot more money on other things that you never heard of. Its not fraud, its just R&D dressed up a little too much too early.
Other than actual research, which is in a different camp.
Besides that, there is a ton of use cases for smaller models for a bunch of different things. We'll be unlikely to be able to run LLMs (actually Large) on smartphones for a while, while the smaller LLMs seem to run already on-device in experiments.
> This public investment underlines the importance of an independent, trustworthy and future‑proof Dutch language model.
It does, but not in the way you think it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A1lia_(LLM)
An ecosystem is the tribal knowledge, revolving door of talent, known processes etc.
If the end goal is to make a half assed Dutch speaking model, I think it won’t cut it. I don’t see anyone using it over Gemma 4b that runs on my laptop.
An ecosystem is more durable and has desirable second order effects.