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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.
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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].
As someone who is in general skeptical of programs like this (and an European) there are 2 remarkable / timely things about this:
- This project doesn't just allocate money to universities or one large company, but includes top research institutions as well as startups and GPU time on supercomputing clusters. The participants are very well connected (e.g. also supported by HF, Together and the likes with European roots)
- Deepseek has just shown that you probably can't beat the big labs with these resources, but you can stay sufficient close to the frontier to make a dent.
Europe needs to try this. Will this close the Gap to the US/China? Probably not. But it could be a catalyst for competitive Open source models and partially revitalize AI in Europe. let's see..
PS: on Twitter there was a screenshot yesterday that in a new EU draft, "accelerate" was used six times. Maybe times are changing a little bit.
Disclaimer: Our company is part of this project, so I might be biased.
I wish you the best of luck. However, this is basically a still just a European joint research project (admittedly compatibly well funded) with similar partners that have been also connected before in other research projects. To really compete in the space it will require new ideas, great talent and good leadership towards a common goal. I have myself been part of many EU funded projects and know the difficulty of realizing this within such a project. Public funding sadly has adversarial effects sometimes.
As for computing cost: as EuroHPC gives resources to research for free there can be more budget for computing. The EuroHPC joint undertaking has just decided to invest hundreds of millions of Euro in new AI clusters and supporting services. So this can come on top. Actually projects like this are much needed to also make good use of the money.
Disclaimer: my lab is involved in one of the new AI Factories.
So, if one has a well thought-through idea, what is the process of getting the resources ($$$) from OpenEuroLLM and the compute from EuroHPC? How do I become a partner as a long-standing engineer with plenty of industry practice in research and development?
I am asking this because I never really understood how EU funds are working, they always seemed to me as there's a lot of gate keeping.
There definitely is - but that we, as a startup that is barely a year old and not widely known outside our niche in AI dev circles and on Huggingface, are part of this is already a sign that times are changing.
To be fair: We probably couldn't have handled the paperwork without LLM´s - but due to this technology, the process was still long and involved but manageable.
(BTW: We´re hiring, if you really want to work on this ;-). As a freelancer/solo entrepreneur this will be difficult though..)
The problem is that:
- These are not really super computing cluster in LLM terms. Leonardo is a 250 PFlops cluster. That is really not much at all.
- If people in charge of this project actually believe R1 costs $5.5M to build from scratch, it's already over.
I think no one believes that R1 costs $5.5m from scratch.
People in this project (most, not all) are very aware of the realities in training and are very well connected in the US as well. Besides Leonardo there are JUWELS, LUMI & other which can be used for ablations and so on.
This will never compete with what the frontier labs have (+ are building) but might be just enough for something, that is close enough to be a useful alternative :).
The only thing that matters is how much regulatory red tape is involved.
My guess is that the paperwork will kill this. Read the announcement. Too much discussion about regulatory framework. In the US or China, all you need is some money and smart people. That’s a very low barrier to getting moving forward.
In other words, to be successful you need to be able to break the law and lobby the government? That is indeed the USA mindset, or should I say United Corporations of America? I'm happy EU is not USA.
That’s absolutely asinine and not at all what I said.
The EU over regulates things like tech and that why they won’t be successful at have an AI tech scene. Over time, anyone good will migrate to the US or China where they can work faster and not have as many rules to deal with.
A simple example is hiring and firing people - it’s much easier to make personnel changes in the US than Europe. As a result, US companies can take more risks.
Yes, US has at-will firing, and healthcare tied to the employer, and so forth. Basically the US has made sure that the corporations have all the power, and the people have none of it. Does this make it easier to make companies? Well of course it does, just like slave trade made it easier to collect crops.
Unlike the US however, we in EU really like having basic human rights - such as mandatory minimum vacation time, healthcare that won't immediately disappear if you lose your job, or depend on the job, as well as not getting fired without cause, and without multiple warnings beforehand.
If the result of this means that we won't be successful in the AI tech scene, or that all the Musk-like slave owners migrate to US or China where they can abuse people however much they like, I'm pretty sure Europeans are not going to shed a tear over that.
I realize more and more that the main difference between Americans and Europeans is that Americans think from the perspective of a corporation, whereas Europeans think from the perspective of themselves, as human beings. We're not compatible, clearly, so there's no need to force us to be the same.
I disagree with "basic human rights". They aren't. And the reason they aren't is because one person's mandatory minimum vacation time is another person's liability.
Yeah, it's great for the employee - I totally agree. But if you run a startup, that's a huge cost.
So yes, we disagree on approaches, and that's fine. Not everyone needs to be like us, and if you reread my original comment, I never said they did. [0]
[0] - "My guess is that the paperwork will kill this."
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side note:
I'm American. I spent 2 weeks in Europe last summer for vacation. I loved it. Food was great, Formula 1 was great. Overall a fantastic time.
But if I'm going to run a startup, I would never do it in Europe. An organic foods company - sure - that would be a great place to do it.
From experience, regulation as an explanation for EU startup competitiveness is overused so much it's almost meaningless. Can you point out specific laws that you consider existential for startups?
What I find matters way, way more is two factors:
- Concentration of capital. The US has an ecosystem of wealthy people that want to put their money somewhere. This is good for startups, but can also backfire as we can see in the news.
- Unified market. EU is not a single market, it's several dozen markets with different regulations, different languages, and different cultures. You can't sell the same B2C product with the same marketing in Germany, Spain, and Sweden as easily as you can in California, Ohio, and Texas.
First, your last point answers your first question: a non-unified market is an implicit result of too many regulations. Harmonizing them would create a more unified market. The US is efficient because it is more homogenous. That efficiency is one of the things that leads to capital formation.
So, I think you have causation backwards. Capital formation doesn't really happen because it's too difficult to build and grow things in Europe.
Look at tech in Silicon Valley - all that capital formation is years worth of growth and reinvestment.
Look at oil & gas Texas - again, all that capital comes from years of growth and reinvestment.
And what you learn in silicon valley you can generally apply to starting a company in Austin Texas. What would happen if Mercedes wanted to move it's company (HQ and all) to Spain? How much would it have to relearn from a regulatory perspective?
I agree that the announcement should´ve talked more about goals and performance than regulatory stuff ;-).
But I think there is a new understanding among the bureaucracy that regulation (alone, without innovation) will kill Europe´s competitiveness and that some acceleration and cutting of red tape is necessary.
Can't say with certainty that this will be successful.
But that we, as a very young startup that is barely known outside of our AI Open Source niche, are part of this, is already a sign in itself - a year ago I´d have never believed that this might be an option (and also probably would've declined if someone asked us to join a EU-funded project).
We will have engineers without a degree (but hundreds of thousands of HF downloads) working side-by-side with some of the top researchers + HPC centers.
What I don't understand is the big plan. Say, you manage bring about something that works in the lab on par with DeepSeek R1. What happens with it next? In the market LLMs are being improved continuously based on feedback - in terms of usage data etc. and new versions are being released multiple times a year. If we want to stay sovereign, we need a similar engine started in Europe, but I can't see how a research project relying on a walled garden system of supercomputer centres can start it.
might be debatable - but I tend to agree with Dario Amodei on this; my guess is that R1 is 7-10 months behind the internal frontier at the big labs, while having a few small novel tricks.
(But i might err, will be interesting to see the development going forward)
I'm Jan, the Co-Founder of ellamind and we're scaling our team to build a next-gen platform helping enterprises improving and evaluating their AI workflows.
Our founders created some of the most popular non-english open source LLMs and we're already working with some of the largest enterprises in Germany to accelerate their pace adopting LLMs in business processes. ellamind is already profitable before our public launch and we offer competitive packages and a VSOP program.
Wow, actually this cookbook is really bad? I expected something like the OpenAI or Anthropic cookbooks, but this seems to be some AI generated low-quality content without any code examples or interesting examples?
The Phi-3 models are great though, especially the vision model has great potential for low latency applications (like robotics?)...
This is such a good comment and should be auto-posted to every pro-nuclear thread.
I get why people want to believe in nuclear and i'd wish that we invested a lot more in development, security and scaling of this technology.... 30 years ago. Now, it's just too late and we have better viable alternatives.
One additional argument that's mostly missed: every fission reactor is only economically viable (if it is at all) when discounting the implicit state guarantee, that's necessary as no insurer will take on the risk. Adding a theoretical risk premium paid by taxpayers to the calculation, nuclear will never be competitive.
I have the same question. Noticed that Ollama got a lot of publicity and seems to be well received, but what exactly is the advantage over using llama.cpp (which also has a built-in server with OpenAI compatibility nowadays?) Directly?
Once you've tested to your heart's content, you'll deploy your model in production. So, looks like this is really just a dev use case, not a production use case.
In production, I'd be more concerned about the possibly of it going off on it's own and autoupdating and causing regressions. FLOSS LLMs are interesting to me because I can precisely control the entire stack.
If Ollama doesn't have a cli flag that disables auto updating and networking altogether, I'm not letting it anywhere near my production environments. Period.
Hey, imho best overall technical intro to LLMs (I guess that´s your main interest as you mentioned qlora + llama) is by Simon Willis [1]. Additionally or if you prefer videos, the recent 1h "busy persons intro" by Andrei Karpathy is great + dense as well [2].
EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood as you asked about papers, not general intros.
I don´t think that reading papers is the best way to "catch up" as the pace is rapid and knowledge very decentralized. I can confirm what Andrej recently wrote on X [3]:
"Unknown to many people, a growing amount of alpha is now outside of Arxiv, sources include but are not limited to:
Does nobody question how they get from a non-preregistered, 9-mouse study (where the treatment group gets only 6%-10% acoholic drinks and nothing non-alcoholic for 10 weeks) to this headline?
Addtionally:
> First, we did not generate offspring using the cessation males. Therefore, we do not know if the sperm noncoding RNA signature we identified correlates with changes in offspring fetoplacental growth or if the resulting offspring would develop normally. However, as significant differences in the ncRNA signature of EtOH-cessation sperm and epididymal mtDNAcn remained, we speculate that abstinence for 1 month is insufficient for the epigenetic memory of paternal alcohol exposure to abate, likely due to the ongoing stress associated with alcohol withdrawal.45, 46 Furthermore, we acknowledge that our analysis does not distinguish between changes in sperm ncRNAs that are causal drivers of altered epigenetic programming in the next generation versus abnormalities that are merely additional symptoms of alcohol-induced stress.
I´m all for science on alcohol abuse and effects of moderate drinking, but this doesn't look like solid science for me (especially as afaik, there is still very few reliable, double-blind controlled evidence on epigenentic effects at all).
But please correct me if I´m wrong (worked with biotech companies on admission studies for several years but no biologist myself).
"Stuffing half a dozen or so mice with booze and not giving them water for months gets them FUCKED UP, so forward this article to everyone whose husband drinks more than one tbsp of beer a week to prove that their child is gonna have all kinds of nasty birth defects" - The Science™
> I´m all for science on alcohol abuse and effects of moderate drinking
But don't we have that? And have recently been getting more and more of that? Most specifically, as I understand the current science: alcohol (e.g., red wine) in any form and any amount is not good for you. Full stop.
I do drink, still, moderately. But given all I hearing / reading, I'm giving more and more consideration to going dry. The "benefits" (i.e., being social, de-stressor, etc) don't seem to be worth it.
It raises your risk of cancer. Not by much, but I'm not aware of anything might outweigh that effect. (you can have a social life without it) I'm not aware of anything that counters those effects.
1. No one dies from "cookies poisoning". No one loses a liver or other organs from too many cookies. Alcohol, by definition, is a poison. The comparison to chocolate chips simply doesn't apply.
2. While I have my general doubts about the WHO in some cases, this was the quickest and easiest thing I could find.
1. No one dies from "cookies poisoning". No one loses a liver or other organs from too many cookies. Alcohol, by definition, is a poison. The comparison to chocolate chips simply doesn't apply.
No, but too much sugar/butter does cause health issues. There's a certain threshold for damage. Does alcohol cause damage to offspring via genetic alteration to sperm? Perhaps it does, but we can't really say anything concrete about it based on a study of this quality.
I'm well aware of the problems cause by sugar and lack of exercise. But, again, alcohol is different. It is literally a poison. Sugar is not a poison in that same sense.
Most claims about whether something is "healthy" or "unhealthy" rely on single studies with small sample/effect sizes. We know that many studies fail to replicate, and in the absence of preregistration there are researcher degrees of freedom for scientists to find whatever they want to find in the data.
I don't know about the current status of alcohol research, but unless there is a large body of replicated work supporting a claim, we should be skeptical of it.
Sounds like an easy place to get great data for their hypothesis. Compare places like Saudi Arabia with England. Sure it's messy because of the other factors to consider (since it's not an experiment), but if there are zero cases of what you're looking for, your own experiment is probably wrong.
Thank you for pointing this out. Unfortunately, there are many problems interacting here. There is an incentive in science journalism to write the most attention-grabbing headline, regardless of how well it summarizes the research. Of the people who read the headline, only a fraction will click through to read the popular article, and only a fraction of those will click through to read the scientific article. Most people have never heard of the replication crisis, preregistration, or researcher degrees of freedom. Even if this is valid research with valid methodology, the scientists themselves are incentivized to cut corners and come up with catchy, counter-intuitive results. It's all a shitshow that drives the spread of misinformation and public distrust in science.
