GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

So good to see these developments. Every country should do this. I'd even say every person should gave their own personalized AI running on their own computers. If only the costs involved were not so astronomical.

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.

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?

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.

[0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...

> A total of €13.5 million has been allocated to the project.

> 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.

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.

Previously posted on 02-dec-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38497495 3 comments

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

Is it a proposal or a model? And if it is a model, how fies it fare on benchmarks?

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.

Supposedly this model also aims to treat publishers of all sizes well. Looking forward to its launch soon :)