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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.

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

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"?

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.

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

Am I the only one who doesn't see any link to any model? Too many words, no actual outcome.

> 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.

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!!!

That project too seems dormant lately.

They just announce things and then the train leaves the station.

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.

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.

In real life: you either train your LLM on Anna's archive, or get left behind with sub-par model

Especially given how notoriously bad are the EU AI regulations.