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submitted 2 weeks ago by raskolnikov@lemm.ee to c/europe@feddit.org

The European Comission has granted €20 million to STEP, the European consortium that will create the AI model. It will be open source, European regulations-compliant and unlike Deepseek, its dataset will also be open source and will be trained in 35 languages.

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[-] bruce965@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I am conflicted about this choice. I am happy that the EU Commission will invest funds into open source technologies, but at the same time the US and China are already investing enough into "free as in free beer" models. Is it really worth it building yet another model?

Why not fund open source software development instead of funding machine learning? €20 million would do miracles divided between a few teams of developers, but they might merely be bread crumbs for machine learning training.

[-] Anyone@slrpnk.net 31 points 2 weeks ago

Is it really worth it building yet another model?

Yes, it is, and it has to do with independence and many other reasons. It'll be multilingual, legally compliant, it comes without Chinese nor other censorship, it is open source unlike Deepseek, ChatGPT, and others.

[-] bruce965@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 weeks ago

Mmh, okay that makes sense. Especially the multilinguality would be pretty important. As for the legality, we'll see how it goes. Do we even know if it's really possible to build a good model with only legally acquired data?

As for the censorship, as far as I know, for DeepSeek's models it's injected in the prompt after the training is completed, so it shouldn't really be censored if you run it locally.

But yeah, you have raised good points. Thanks.

[-] Anyone@slrpnk.net 13 points 2 weeks ago

No, DeepSeek isn’t uncensored if you run it locally.

Everything that comes from China is censored, because private companies must apply to the Chinese censorship laws.

[-] RVGamer06@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

The local version could be theoretically be uncensored through abliteration tho

[-] bruce965@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

Understood, thanks 👍

[-] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 10 points 2 weeks ago

That money should definitely go towards funding sovereign cloud infrastructure and open source software instead of vaporware AI bullshit. Where will you run your LLMs if you have no infra..

[-] albert180@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 weeks ago

We already have sovereign Cloud Infrastructure (OVH, Scaleway etc...)

Most people use AWS, Azure and Google Cloud because of Resume Driven Development and nobody got fired for buying AWS, and most of them probably don't need them

[-] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 1 points 2 weeks ago

Nobody in Europe can realistically compete with AWS, GCP or Azure. Especially not OVH. They mostly focus on small and medium businesses and I wouldn't trust them for large scale operations like the ones you can do on AWS. They had one too many dumb problems caused by poor design/decisions.
Maybe I should have been more precise: we don't have sovereign hyperscalers in Europe.

[-] albert180@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 weeks ago

You don't need those companies to run a big LLM in the Cloud.

You can do that on OVH, Scaleway etc...

[-] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 2 points 2 weeks ago

Fair enough !

[-] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 6 points 2 weeks ago

2 main issues with the lack of Euro models: 1) Performance of all SOTA models is much better in English. 2) US models have US values. It's yet another tool to culturally assimilate Europe (and the rest of the world too)

[-] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago

Hey! Look at me! I also want to be a dumpster fire.

[-] niktemadur@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

At the very least the name is much more technically accurate by putting LLM instead of AI in there.

[-] WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social 13 points 2 weeks ago
[-] guaraguaito 19 points 2 weeks ago

To be fair — I wouldn’t mind an open source AI model that works decently well and isn’t made and selectively propagandised by China or Meta.

Obviously I’m sick of all the LLM enshittification — but there’s a couple tasks I wouldn’t mind having a FOSS LLM for.

[-] WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago

I could get down with that.

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 11 points 2 weeks ago

I mean a whole lot of people are using AI for a whole lot of different things. It's easy to hate on, but it's here to stay.

[-] DavidGarcia@feddit.nl 7 points 2 weeks ago

with that little money split between that many institutions, nothing will come of it.

It's especially pointless ever since DeepSeek R1 dropped. Now everyone has the recipie to build state of the art models, so it's only a matter of time until European companies will create one.

[-] remon@ani.social 7 points 2 weeks ago

Well, investing a mere €20 millions won't achieve much. On the other hand I'm glad they aren't wasting more money on it.

[-] clb92@feddit.dk 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Wasn't DeepSeek v3 trained with single-digit million dollars budget?

[-] eigenspace@feddit.org 6 points 2 weeks ago

Probably not. There's a lot of reasons to be skeptical of those claimed numbers.

[-] lud@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago

Iirc leaked numbers says something closer to 1 billion USD

[-] JustJack23@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 weeks ago
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
104 points (100.0% liked)

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