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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 :).
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 :).
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.
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..)
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)
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'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.