Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe(openeurollm.eu) |
Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe(openeurollm.eu) |
translation: weakest competitor in the contest enters the fight with both hands tied behind its back and a budget akin to what OpenAI spends in a week on compute.
But hey, more power to you Europe: the more models around, the better.
Eventually, we'll be able to bind all those censored models worldwide into one giant mixture of expert to get rid of the built-in censorship of each individual component.
Meaning, everyone will talk, noone will take charge, some millions change hands and we continue with business as usual.
Instead this should have been a single new non-profit or whatever with deep pockets that convinces smart people to give their 100% for a while.
Death by committee. And I say this as someone who was in a multi-million research program across ~8 universities, that was going to do "groundbreaking" research. After a few months everyone was back to pushing their own lines of research, there was almost zero collaboration let alone common language or goal setting.
As a person who's in this type of projects for a long time, what I can say is "it works", because people do not compete with each other, but will build it together.
What I can say is, if they have came this far, there's already plans about what to do, and how to do, and none of the parties are inexperienced in these kinds of things.
Ball of mud.
Unless by work you mean "successfully passed the post-project review by non-experts based on a bunch of slides"
Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.
Business and research are difficult enough even when done by tightly knit teams and constantly tested against real world systems and customer feedback. The idea that a hodgepodge of organisations can achieve poorly defined yet aspirational goals on a low budget is massively misguided.
This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon, because I don't think any independent observer could look at Horizon projects and say they just work.
Funding is tied to employee qualifications and effectively subsidises salaries, which creates room for misalignment. No-shows of allocated employees were not uncommon, since a company willing to accept lower-quality deliverables can assign junior employees to do the work at a fraction of the cost, while the salary difference for their PhDs simply becomes added margin.
Remember the EU Search Engine project, Quaero, and its equally failed successor, Theseus? No? I thought so.
I'll believe it works after they finally have one success
The problem is academic culture is corrupt, and it’s very hard to reverse the decay.
Simple example: one Russell Group UK university (like many others) was admitting students who couldn’t speak English. A lecturer on a technical subject found they were struggling to understand his course, in part due to the language barrier. Come the exam, most of the students failed. He was told to make the exam easier so they would pass. The lecturer involved is a well meaning kindly man who would consider himself very ethical. But he did what he was told and the students passed.
In such a system it’s hard to see how an individual can fix it. If he had protested, he’d have been gently moved aside and the exam would have been rewritten by someone else.
Research is similarly corrupt. Grants are written to match a call, and they promise the earth. Friends review them and score highly. Pals on the grant committee favour their friends. And it’s implicitly agreed that the outcomes don’t have to be achieved. You go back to doing your original research, or not doing much at all, or more likely figuring out how to get some papers published and writing more grant proposals.
The idealistic, actually interested in progressing the field, leave or are squeezed out, looked over for lectureships in favour of folks who bring in grants via bs and politics.
Choose a topic you know about. Go on the EPSRC website. Look at grants ten years ago and see what their promised outcomes were.
My only answer is that a project like this must be done by people hired from outside of academia, which at this point is probably corrupt beyond repair. I look back at previous generations and wonder how the hell so much advancement was achieved.
They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.
I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior.
Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.
There are loads of people who think "there is no moat and Europe can do this" (including the Portuguese government, which announced a Portuguese LLM at WebSummit--which, hilariously, is being trained on a research "supercomputer" in Spain), and they have no idea how far (politically, economically and pragmatically) Europe's tech scene is from the US. Other than Mistral, of course.
This is how the EU works. It's the reason the EU has very little innovation compared to the USA.
Nice way to frame this.
€70 MM to get the digital copies of 3 million slides. Speaks for itself.
Anyway, they're still failing along, burning through a seemingly infinite runway. Academia FTW!
- 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.
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/pioneering-ai-...
As someone who lives here, I'd actually be surprised if we even got that. I expect lots of taxpayer funded websites, manifestos, PowerPoints and numerous discussions and ultimately nothing.
the eu gets some publicity
and the public gets nothing but another bite out of their taxes
Also can't wait to get bombarded with cookie popup, ai bias popup, then ai accuracy popup etc.
It's all fun and games until AI models decide your type of people (blonde/brown/from that zip code/with that type of last name/went to that school/worked there in the past/have those facial features) are "bad" or "untrustworthy" or don't deserve healthcare or to be hired for that job or get a mortgage.
"AI" bias has existed for as long as we have had "AI" in its various forms. Remember ML algorithms classifying black people as monkeys? And the "solution" was to make them unable to find monkeys or primates. That one got big because of the implication.. when it's "people with the last name Smith being dumb", nobody will care
I'm sure that all AI research needs is "robust regulation".
As a European, it annoys me to no end that Brussels bureaucrats think they know and understand everything and they can regulate everything, the only thing they are achieving is making sure that AI companies will avoid forming in the EU, because nobody wants to be at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world, sure eventually they will provide service to the EU countries, but we will never have our own industry.
The EU needs to stop having pencil pushers make decisions on things they have no clue about and somehow get people who know what they are talking about to make the choices.
USA has just proven they are economically unpredictable & so unstable they have become fiscally volatile with control in the hands of the lobbiests. This is why Open LLM has the starting support it does already, & for soverign nations is seen as mission critical so as to avoid long term digital services taxations being leveraged like tarrifs against anyone who does not cooperate with whomever is leading the USA.
So to me it feels as though the project is impressive, & quite likely to succeed where others have failed because so few do understand the technology enough to get in the way of progress towards openly standardizing decentralization of AI compute across soverign cloud infrastructures. Even if Aleph Alpha is not able to lead development fast enough, organizations such as OUMI (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) will be working alongside them in attempts to build out the Linuxs of AI frontier modelling.
If nothing else, Open LLM guarantees a raise in the social standards of what it takes to succeed in AI long term. At worst it provides a measure bar of success of global AI innitiatives to be compared against while introducing new organizations & people to the open source ecosystem who would never of otherwise invested in it without the EU stamp of approval.
As a European, that's practically an oxymoron. The more one limits oneself to legally clean data, the worse the models will be.
I hate to be pessimistic from the get go, but it doesn't sound like anything useful will be produced by this and we'll have to keep relying on Google to do proper multilinguality in open models because Mistral can't be arsed to bother beyond French and German.
The author was in Europe.
Aparently, all the rules protecting the privacy of european citizens make no difference in practice.
I wonder why, but I believe the EU will look into this soon, since it would be so unconfortable if the king were bad.
The result of this is we don't see anything out daughter does in school because school decides to comply with draconian regulation by saying "fuck it". The same applies to having parents present daily: we don't touch the grounds of the school unless we make a formal request, we don't see the teacher everyday, we don't hear how the day went from professionals who actually spent time with them. This is all 100% the opposite of our experience outside of Europe before moving and I'm comparing public school system in a third world country to an European one. It's just an anecdote but it hasn't been more clear to me how much in a death spiral the EU is than the experience we currently are having
Presumably based on this experience, more recent internet-y laws (DMA, DSA, AI Act) are _not_ dependent on national regulators, and enforcement is getting off the ground more or less immediately. I'd expect that when the GDPR's successor shows up it'll follow suit.
This is the single greatest motivators for American companies in our exhausting capitalistic society.
Followed by a list of five EU AI companies I have never heard of before and which seem to have little to no market penetration.
- Good data is available already for the project.
- There are already previously existing models, it is not starting from scratch.
- Companies like Red Hat, Volvo, SAAB are part of the initiative thru partners like AI Sweden. So, this is a initiative to support the public sector and universities but also will have commercial output.
All that is public information.
> The project, which has been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, leverages support from previous European projects and the experience of the partners and their results, including large repositories of high-quality data and pilot LLMs developed previously. The consortium commences its work on February 1st, 2025, with funding from the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme. - https://sciencebusiness.net/network-updates/charles-universi...
More than LLMs, Europe needs chip autonomy. ASAP.
Own fabs, own IP.
Rather, invest in defense and protect trade with Taiwan.
We can do what we are best at and produce lithography equipment at ASML and the Taiwanese at TSMC produce the chips with it and send them back to us.
With all the regulations and paperwork around EU projects, I can't really see them competing against private sector.
I'm all for the advancement of AI, but not at the cost of humility and compassion for those enabling the models to be built.
Model building is already a community project, you just weren't asked if you wanted to contribute. You just did. Without compensation.
"rule bending" is putting it lightly.
You may wish it wasn't like that (not you, but all of us), but there's no way China or USA block their companies in development of key technology like this, and I think we (EU countries) should act in the same way.
Anyway I think some novel training method is needed and I’m with Yann on this. They could luck into good idea but with this budget chances are < 1%
I am VERY curious about that. Will they open up ALL the training data? Which would be a massive amount I'd guess, but I'd be curious where they got it and how they got it. Inb4 they just take some meta model and retrain it and then only publish the data from the fine tuned training.
The commercial aspect must be implemented ASAP, or it's going to flop.
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.
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.
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 :).
PS: Huge fan of Latent Space :)
wdym?
The goals don’t matter.
The people don’t matter.
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.
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.
No way
is that a new take? cause so far deepseek was considered as proof for small companies being able to compete with big players like openai ...
For everyone here shouting that the EU needs to do something, be a leader, what have they lost so far by choosing to lead in legislation instead of development?
They've lost nothing. They've gained a lot.
They can use the same frontier level open source model as everyone else, and meanwhile, they can stay on top of harmful uses like social or credit scoring.
Also speaking as a European, legislation is kind of the point of a government in the first place. I do think the EU goes too far in many cases. But I haven't seen anything that makes me think they're dealing with this particular hype train badly so far. Play the safe long game, let everyone else spend all the money, see what works, focus on legislation of potentially dangerous technology.
I would personally consider legislation to be but one means to an end, with the point of a (democratic) government actually being to ensure stability and prosperity for its citizens.
In that framework, "leading with legislation" doesn't make any sense—you can lead with results, but the legislation is not itself a result! Lead with development or lead with standard of living or lead with civil rights, but don't lead with legislation.
Your formulation sounds like politician's logic: "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it". Legislation as an end in itself. Very interesting.
We are dependent on models created by USA and Chinese companies for access to the technology that seems to be the next internet - while the entire world is accelerating hard towards protectionism and tariff wars.
What could possibly go wrong
> Creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.
If they have this as their top priority and allotted few billion dollars then sure. Not in the current form where the people involved are only involved for publication, not doing hard engineering things that takes months or years and they could do the same thing in OpenAI or Deepseek for like $1 million salary which both of them pay.
> legislation is kind of the point of a government
As an American, most of this post reads like doublespeak satire. I guess it's not, but just to put a transatlantic pov here.
I'll add a sports metaphor for good measure: in order to become expert football players, we'll get tickets to watch the best teams play.
Private sector often does not fund projects like these as they have bad return on investment.
They seem to have enough to send overseas and to spend on illegal economic migrants.
>Private sector often does not fund projects like these as they have bad return on investment.
Then why does the private sector in the US fund projects like these?
I have zero doubt that nothing else will come out of this.
Source: have been working with major UN and international bodies on the software side.
Like, insofar as any of this is useful, working on, say, more techniques for reducing cost feels a lot more valuable than cranking out yet another frontier model which will be superseded within months.
Multilingualism in context of language models means something more than English, because that's what every model trained on the internet already knows. There aren't any I'm aware of that don't, since it would be exceedingly hard to exclude it from the dataset even if you wanted to for some reason. This is like the "what about men's rights" when talking about women's rights... yes we know, they're already entirely ubiquitous.
But more properly I would consider LLM multilingualism straight up knowing all languages. We benchmark models on the MMLU and similar collections that contain all fields of knowledge known to man, so I would say it's reasonable to expect fluency of all languages as well.
Train an LLM with text books and other legal books, you do not need to train it on pop culture to make it intelligent.
For face generations you might need to be more creative, you should not need milions of images stolen from social media to train your model.
But makes sense that tech giants do not want to share their data set and be transparent about stuff.
Without licenses to the books, they are just as illegal (and maybe even moreso) than web content.
Any more details here or a writeup you can link to?
Ravenwolf posts tests on his German benchmarks every so often in locallama and most models seem to do well enough, but I've heard some claims from people about Mistral's being their favorite models in German anyhow. And I think Mistral-Large scores higher than Llama-405B in French on lmsys and that's at least something one would expect from a French company.
Llama 3.1 and DeepSeek v3/R1 largest models are rather good at even a niche language like Finnish. The performance does plummet in the smaller versions, and even quantization may harm multilinguality disproportionally.
Something like deliberately distilling specific languages from the largest models could work well. Starting from scratch with a "legal" dataset will most likely fail as you say.
Silo AI (co-lead of this model) already tried Finnish and Scandinavian/Nordic models with the from-scratch strategy, and the results are not too encouraging.
Something like 4o is so perfect in most languages that one could just make an infinite dataset from it and be done with it. I'm not sure how OAI managed it tbh.
other example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia-X
The German parents I know wouldn't consider going to the school without reason (kids go either alone or as a group), nor would they expect their teachers to give daily reports. Not because of privacy rules, but rather because you're expected to grow up independent. There are of course regular reports, but talking to the kid's teacher every day would, I believe, get you classified as "oh, that parent". And then there's also the problem of vindictive divorcing parents who take their children away before the other parent shows up.
> we don't see anything our daughter does in school
If you're talking about photos of the children then I can't imagine a cost-effective way to ensure that photos of your children end up on the Internet while photos of my (hypothetical) children hugging yours do not. But perhaps you have a more precise example in mind.
This makes very little sense. Our daughter's school just has three checkboxes: private school website, social media, local newspapers. We checked 'private school website' and we get pictures of school activities, but they don't post them on Facebook, etc.
we don't hear how the day went from professionals who actually spent time with them
Uhm, so? I don't feel the need to micro-manage our daughter's school life? She'll tell us what she did after school if she so pleases. If there is something important, the teacher will send a message. Not everything needs to a 24/7 live social media feed. Kids go to and from school by themselves and arrange their own playdates after a certain age, that's how they learn to be independent.
When I was a kid I also went from/to school by myself starting when I was maybe 7 or 8?
I'm just not sure whether it's worse to be behind or to try to be in front by all means necessary.
You're correct, in retrospect I was a bit hyperbolic in my statement.
A better statement of my view is: the goal of a government should be the prosperity and wellbeing of it's citizens and the greater system we're all a part of (both geopolitical and ecological), and the best way we've so far discovered to do that is via legislation of an otherwise free market.
Aleph Alpha is a business that has been going for some time in this sector, at least a couple of years with commercial LLM products. It's likely they'll provide hardware and base models for this project.
If you mean the NDICI stuff, that's hardly 'sending money overseas', and it's a fairly tiny fraction of spending.
> and to spend on illegal economic migrants.
... What are you talking about here? What portion of the EU budget is spent on that? What activity specifically?
In the real world, most EU spending is on regional development, agricultural stuff, and operating the EU (civil service, enforcement bodies, etc etc). The EU is not a country and has only a very small budget (about 170bn/year).
But this does seem different since they plan on building open-source models which would benefit everyone equally (and no one in particular), it would just level the playing field more I guess?
I think this and things like MCP [2] are fantastic, they would make the LLM just one interchangeable piece you can buy from anywhere or host yourself.
Some scientists invent hypotheses with no basis in reality, and say that they can be proven with a big and expensive collider. When that collider is being built and fail to find the requisite particles, those same scientists say they need a bigger and more expensive collider. GoTo 01.
A lot of these scientists fail to explain what will happen when their hypotheses won't find the requisite particles, essentially generating meaningless papers which are blind stabs at reality. It's like saying that leprechauns exist, but to see them we need a 100 billion euro device. And if we do build it fail to see it, then whoops, it wasn't enough.
tl;dr: LHC is not a particularly good example of proper scientific achievement. More like an achievement in PR and budget grants. Per positive scientific discovery produced there.
It was also certainly not a PR stunt as it was truly an insanely complex piece of engineering. It is one of humanity's largest technological undertakings ever. Projects of this scale are still beyond the means even of the world's richest oligarchs. But it is a fine example of the things you can achieve in an enormous but well functioning multi-national bureaucracy.
Doesn't sound too good wrt their eventual profitability.
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..)
Regarding compute simply file an application here: https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/access-our-supercomputers/euroh...
The data analytics and AI call is currently not open but the AI factories will start in April, so there will be compute.
If you have questions don't hesitate to contact me as I will have to do commuty management for HammerHAI
or block tracking altogether.
these cookie banners collectively wasted billions of hours for no gain.
Lack of competition for you. Very American, not very EU.
There are books that are out of copyright, and also free books.
Copyright sucks.
Directly funded by Horizon, made by a consortium of 4 European universities, now a part of Firefox?
Honestly, I'm not sure if you posted this is support of Horizon or against? The Horizon budget for 2021-2027 is €95.5 billion or ~€15 billion per annum. If a headline "success" is an unfinished implementation of translation in Firefox of a translation engine (Marian) built by the Microsoft Translator team, then it's safe to say Horizon is an unqualified failure.
(I'm a Mozilla employee, but I have not worked on Firefox Translations.)
It does look like Microsoft is (was) funding the project, and employs one of the authors as head of research at Microsoft Translator, which is great, but all the "seed" funding and actual research happened in EU. Microsoft hired the author only in 2018 [1], while the earliest EU grant was allocated in 2015 [2], and the main paper they published says "it has mainly been developed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Edinburgh" [3].
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/junczys/
What's unfinished about it?
And Marian also received 6 grants via Horizon, in cooperation with the exact same universities (the one in Edinburgh being the main one), so I'm not sure what's your point?
And did I try to list every success or one tangible example, as the parent asked?
And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
[0]: https://browser.mt/
[1]: https://hplt-project.org/
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/translations?tab=readme-ov-file#a...
Also money will be better spent with one common language instead of wasting so much time, resources and inconveniencing people with so many languages in this area.
Yeah, you guys have a lot of brainwashing to get over. I can imagine that you're deeply conditioned to read any outside views on politics as satire.
One kind of brainwashing is the need to reframe everything political into sports metaphors. The EU is not a sports team. It's a political entity. Whatever you might have been taught, these are very different things, with different needs. You can't have meaningful conversations about a political entity via sports metaphors.
Well, maybe in US politics you can. There you have two teams determined to beat the other at all costs. EU politics isn't like that. We are trying to work together, not kill each other.
On the surface. It's all kayfabe though; heels and babyfaces. Just like with wrestling, the media know the score, and all the angles. After the match, they all laugh and joke together on the depraved billionaire owner's megayacht.
But one side wants to do that while looking out over a fascist dictatorship.
The other side has some weird idea that the billionaires will use their wealth to create a good life for everyone else too. Even though the term went out of fashion, it's still trickle down economics.
These two sides are not the same. They're both bad, but one is much worse. The last time fascism took hold it took nuclear bombs in Japan and firebombing Dresden to end it.
Oh? Been quite a while longer since there was war inside the US than war inside Europe. While it's been no time at all since vicious party battles in major European countries. Or countries nope'ing out entirely. But apparently fascists are only a thing in the US now?
> creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU
What industry has the EU caught up in or maintained pace in like that by "leading in legislation"?
I'd probably much rather retire in the EU than in the US but... there are certainly cons, not just pros, to the lack of urgency and bureaucratic "lets throw words at the problem" approach to economic development.
Maybe you need to look up why the EU exists in the first place. Way back when it was called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). There haven't been any wars between member countries since it's foundation, so I think it's working pretty well, actually.
> What industry has the EU caught up in or maintained pace
What industries is the US leading which reflects itself in improvement of quality of life of its citizens? Cause some things really don't matter in grand scheme of things.
Most expensive bug of all time that crashed a whole rocket, because of outdated and wrong software engineering practice.
They dont innovate, looked down on SpaceX, they have bet against Falcon, and lost the bet.
Now they are betting against the Starship.
> Honestly, I don’t think Starship will be a game-changer or a real competitor
-- ESA chief 2024
https://spacenews.com/europe-aims-to-end-space-access-crisis...
Meanwhile EU members are now launching their public project with SpaceX instead of ESA:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/spacex-rocket-next-g...
https://apnews.com/article/nasa-spacex-launch-astronauts-pri...
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/IRIDE_p...
The EU had committed to a number of deep space and scientific instrument programmes spanning decades and seen them through to success. It operates its own GNSS constellation. It is second only to NASA. Calling it a failure is ridiculous.
being valued at $ 370 million in 1996 that bug was recently dwarved by crowd strikes multi-billion-dollar disaster in 2024
Different Europe. The ESA is is not an EU agency so it runs by its own rules, its members include several non-EU countries, it has a non-European "cooperating state" and its funding is direct from member states.
https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Member_States_Co...
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.
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.
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."
------ 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.
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.
[0] - https://x.com/paulg/status/1887186094120137042?s=46&t=mXA1Wm...
[1] - https://x.com/paulg/status/1887249759557009903?s=46&t=mXA1Wm...
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?
The Horizon/Bergamot project ended with seven languages. Anything thereafter was added separately.
> What's unfinished about it?
The project ended with an unfinished implementation.
> And Marian was also funded by Horizon, also in cooperation with the exact same universities, so I'm not sure what's your point?
No, Marian was funded by MS.
You are revising history extraordinarily to make the most unimpressive project appear better than it was. If Bergamot achieved all its goals and was the exemplar of Horizon, Horizon would be a complete failure.
As it was, the project limped over the line unfinished to be picked up by Mozilla.
No, I'm not dependent on Horizon Programme. I just look at what we did, the outcomes, and talk from that point.
Maybe our sphere is one of the ones which deliver. I can't see the whole thing, it's too big to observe. Even if we're in the 5% which delivers, which is same with the startup scene, which is loudly applauded because it's an incredibly well working system.
If the whole research project at the end actually delivers a somewhat coherent prototype, it's seen as a huge success.
Most start-ups start with a proof-of-concept prototype to transform it into an economically viable product.
So, comparing these success rates does not make sense. Multiple research groups can deliver rough prototypes at the end and celebrate their "huge success". In most fields, there can be only a few economically surviving startups...
And most fail utterly at even delivering a viable product, let alone an economically viable one.,
~~Only Firefox users who explicitly enable offline translation per langauge in Settings use this feature~~, which will be a tiny minority of users in a browser with a tiny (~2.5%) market share.
I'm wrong, the language packs now auto-download.
> And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
Well, those weren't the seven languages supported by the Bergamot project when it ended. Only two of your seven were supported: Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish.
It was basically Dreamchaser, only in the 1980s, and cancelled.
Also, not all EU states are ESA member states.
Canada is on the ESA governing council, and takes part in projects.
In the context of Eu grants being discussed in this thread, its financing arrangements are very different from those, so its irrelevant to discussing the effectiveness or not of those.
Next thing I know one of those Horizon 2020 project send me 20 proposals to evaluate and select by next week. Each of them was 50-100 pages long, mostly BS.
I couldn't really do any real due diligence and I don't believe anybody did any on me. So just create register fake domain names to get a fake corporate email addresses, create a fake LinkedIn profiles and you can have a significant weight in the selection process for grants. It is that simple.
I remember it made me feel sick in my stomach to think that the money that would be given through my evaluation was most likely equivalent to one year of tax revenue from a random honest small business.
What I also discovered is often let's say the EU wants to give 10M to 10 projects in a particular domain. Then a there are companies specialised in applying as a project and saying: our project is actually to subdivide this 1M into 8 times 100K and we keep 200K as a fee (I am simplifying but that was the idea).
Not sure what is your limiting factor (just universities + industry consortiums or explicit IT projects?).
Graphene Flagship might be an example, with their research on Graphene they contributed to the foundation of more efficient batteries and solar panels, innovation in automotive and commercial products and so on.
Clean Sky Joint Undertaking (CSJU) also had quite some impact on the industry (I think it was part of EU's Horizon 2020). They worked on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions and noise of Aircrafts and contributed quite a bit to the European industry (Rotor engine innovations, advanced greener materials, etc.)
And I think the discovery of the Higgs boson was also the result of a European Research consortium with CERN...
So yeah, Europe is surely not the center of all innovation and economic efficiency, but I wouldn't demonize every attempt to change that...
Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster that missed all its targets.
As stated elsewhere, CERN is a cautionary tale - the LHC is a vestige of a time when Europe was an economic and scientific powerhouse. If the last 15-20 years we have become an also-ran to the US and China.
There's an endless list of these soft failed Horizon projects:
* Human Brain Project * European Processor Initiative * Innovative Medicines Initiative * LIGHTest * The Once-Only Principle Project * OpenAIRE * Quantum Flagship
And on and on. No results. No ROI.
According to whom, based on which metric?
This is foundational material and chemistry research, with UK, Germany and Spain at the forefront for an industry which will probably need another 10 years to fully unfold.
For sure other China and US were able to invest more, but should the EU have not invested at all?
> Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster
Also here, based on which metric?
The cost was split in half among the EU and industry players, and those companies (i.e. Airbus, Saab, Rolls-Royce, Safran, Liebherr, Thales) are all still at the forefront of their respective industries, despite competition from much larger markets. It's a sensible strategy to support them while steering aspects of their R&D towards a specific set of common goals for the EU.
Yeah, among others they had a goal of achieving a 50% cut in CO2 emissions just by improving fuel efficiency, a quite ambitious goal they didn't reach. But they set and co-funded the direction and achieved a 30% reduction.
They also had a goal of achieving 50% noise reduction for aircrafts, and ultimately developed concepts with up to 70% lower noise-production. Without such funding I doubt that such research would have even been conducted.
--
So yes, there's a much larger list of failed Horizon projects, fully agree. And many of them shouldn't even exist in hindsight. But it's research, it's supposed to be an uncertain field with uncertain commercial value. I rather have the EU fund 5 moonshots with 3 of them questionable than decide to not fund any research in Europe unless the commercial value is first proven by someone else.
There are areas I don't know how they would even be funded by a for-profit market without such initiatives, like the Rail Joint Undertaking which aims to develop and harmonize the European rail system across borders of EU countries.
CERN is a scientific marvel.
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/homebrew-metrology-the-cern-...
Reminds me of the Civilisation Wonders you could build.
- There's continuous reporting, and money is not guaranteed.
- You can be removed from the project by not meeting project goals on time.
- (In this case) There are corporations which are planning to commercialize this thing.
- There's a concrete and sound roadmap, and it's evaluated in a competition by an independent body and got selected.
- Without a sound landscape survey, you can't get this type of grant, so free market forces are included.
- ...and more (I'm trying to be concise).
I'm in many European projects of this kind for close to two decades. These projects do not result in papers. They result in deliverables (documents and what you are intending to build), and they deliver. While I can't go into details, the atmosphere is never an "academic" one, but it's connected to real world. We sometimes work with commercial entities to improve their know-how and abilities, too. Many of the projects have commercial partners which commercialize these technologies, esp in earth/ecosystem observation.
Sometimes we support them for free, because they need to do the research to be able to show what they are doing for an initial grant. It's not about money, fame, having a corner office with free flowing grant money or travel.
People do this to improve the world around them and make an impact, and we don't fight over wins. We drink coffee and work hard to deliver what we promised.
Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.
No, they are subsidies for uncompetitive R&D teams. They are spectacularly inefficient, for all the reasons you mention. Teams specialise in Horizon funding, not actual progress.
> Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.
Aha, so your team is funded by Horizon. What's the old saying about people and understanding where their paycheques come from?
I'm not entirely convinced...
You mention deliverables as document specs? Those are not the deliverables. The deliverables are products that gain traction and see success on the market or research topics that gain traction in the academia because of their groundbreaking methods. That in sufficiently short period of time because otherwise you cannot remain competetive. Leaving "commercialization" on the table while we figure out something is also what is wrong with the system. The world does not wait for EU to commercialize the idea that has been put into a document 5 years ago.
I can give concrete examples of many large EU companies and institutions, because they are just that and they have a lot of power, getting millions of EURs just to produce BIG nothing. Innovation is not at the heart of these projects. Mostly subpar engineers with no deep science research.
Can you list me few examples of successful projects you have in mind? Why, for example, Mistral AI isn't among them?
Yeah, I was surprised too. I would expect Mistral to jump on the band wagon if only to get some easy EU funding.
I had a _so_ different experience after being involved in two of them...
That sounds horrible and stressful to be honest.
Even if EU’s QoL is on borrowed time, at least it has it for some time.
It's getting bad now. It'll be terrible after 20 more years if course is not corrected.
Democrat elites knew full well, as did the world, that 77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo. Everyone who cared to look knew that in close battleground states over 3 in 10 Biden 2020 voters were saying that their vote could be affected by this, such was their feeling on this issue - understandable, given the daily atrocities livestreamed around the world.
Kamala's campaign had an easy win, a landslide victory for the taking. All they had to do was promise an arms embargo. Instead, she promised to keep sending bombs "no matter what"; even before her campaign page had a single policy on it. Does that look like they were fighting to beat the Republicans "at all costs"?
... How did Democrats hold Trump accountable for his insurrection attempt? Did that look like 'determination to win' to you? [0]
Did Blinken, Miller, Patel, Karine etc look or sound any less cartoonishly evil than the Trump goons? The things they said up there were mind-bogglingly cruel; staggeringly disrespectful of our intelligence.
The Biden admin censored millions of posts, pushed knowingly fake stories, physically removed journalists from the press room for asking legitimate questions, etc. Not super Democratic.
Sure; Republicans are much worse on some issues. But this corporate plutocracy didn't come out of nowhere. Despite the claims from the current Dem team, they do in fact take a lot of money from "bad" billionaires.
Even now, Democrats are crowing that Trump isn't deporting as many immigrants as they did. Because that's what's important right now??
Biden's admin pulled out all the stops to shut down student protesters - compare that to their response to Musk raiding the Treasury!
The two sides are not quite the same (neither are heels and heroes, ya know), but they are funded and owned by the same people. The difference is very clear when you see the unanimous support across the political and media class for things which the American people don't actually want - forever wars, environmental exploitation, tax cuts for the wealthy, full on genocide etc.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
You probably shouldn’t be calling other people brainwashed.
If this were a book or a movie, everyone would be dismissing it as far too obvious and not how real world works.
Just remember that what most people think of when you say "fascism" is "literally Nazis".
I don't think many people believe that's where the US is heading. There are far more possible flavors of fascism.
The direction of the US is more like what Russia has, an oligarchy, with elements of fascism like concentration camps.
Is this it?
https://glam.telemetry.mozilla.org/fog/probe/translations_re...*
Before integration, it had ~490 users as an extension, vs ~800,000 for To Google Translate, the number one option.
Offline translation has to be manually enabled per language in Settings.
Frankly I don't believe there's any meaningful usage until I see the numbers.
Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.
It's still a niche feature only partially built by a Horizon project (it was almost entirely built by commercial entities - MS and Mozilla) in a niche browser.
It's an indictment of the Horizon programme that this is considered the pre-eminent success story.
(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)
Plus, I'm not here to convince anybody. I'm just sharing my own experience. It's up to you to dig further if you're so interested in this thing.
Have a nice day.
Well, I think it's safe to say mission accomplished.
Your comments here are why entities have media policies. Probably thousands of peoples will have read your comments and the responses to them and many will have formed their first impression of Horizon from this thread.
There are other criticisms for the system, and I didn't either answer them, or answered more broadly. Again, what I have seen is the system was working for the parts I was in, and may not be working for the others, and I'm not defending the contrary.
Every coin has at least two sides, and I'm not a god. I can only comment on what I can see and experience.
I didn't even know it was a new Firefox feature but I thought it was cool.
Well done EU.
If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
The example we're talking about is powered by a Marian, developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft.
The Horizon project was to use that to create a Firefox plugin, which they did.
Another US multinational, Mozilla, later integrated into Firefox.
Firefox has 4.55% market share in Europe.
> Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
You are presenting a false and frankly bad faith dichotomy.
* developing the first meaningful fully-reusable first stage rocket, and continuing to develop it to the extent that no other launch systems are even in the same ballpark as regards cost, cadence, or mass to orbit
* developing, and continuing to develop, the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine
* developing, and continuing to develop, a novel, completely-reusable, next-generation very-heavy-lift platform, before any of the competition have even caught with their previous generation
* (to your snarky point about explosions) demonstrating that moving fast, evolving designs quickly, and not being afraid to (be seen to) fail (in the short term, in the court of public opinion, etc.) in the pursuit of success is much better than the traditional conservative approach (e.g. NASA, Blue Origin, etc.)
I'm well aware that giving credit to anything related to Musk is increasingly difficult for some people at the moment, but let's give credit where it's due to SpaceX and its engineers.
The rest of your points is really one item, launch vehicles. It's where the USA clearly has the lead (above everyone else, not just ESA in particular). The question was whether the EU can successfully manage complex projects and it clearly can, suggesting otherwise is delirious.
The previous poster was basically supportive of SpaceX, talked about innovation, and didn't mention explosions at all. You wrote "If your metric of innovation is the amount of rockets exploded at debuts you shouldn't bring up SpaceX really." I interpreted this as a snarky reference to the fact the lots of SpaceX rockets have blown up - mostly due to their different approach to development.
The comment implying that SpaceX isn't innovative is what I was replying to - that looking at the work that SpaceX does (and not the whole pantheon of other space-related work it's not involved in) it's demonstrably innovative in a way that ESA just isn't (e.g. with Ariane).
The space shuttle solid boosters were reusable, the only part of the space shuttle program that wasn't, was the big orange tank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_B...
It's the most expensive bug in history. On the other hand, you are bringing up explosions of empty rockets that are launched as test, that's bad faith.
Look at the launch history and the Falcon 9 is simply more reliable than the Ariane 5:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_outcomes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_statistics
I did not said it was a failure, I said, they do not have a "pretty good track record". ESA burn through EU money, and wont care to innovate as long as EU provide them unlimited money and dont pressure them. It's an ivory tower.
Only 33 years later and mostly launched on Russian rockets, behind GLONASS and BeiDou.
> It is second only to NASA. Calling it a failure is ridiculous.
In what respect? Space? Certainly not, far behind the US and Russia and questionably competitive with China.
Economically? Behind US and China.
R&D? Behind US and China.
Manufacturing? Behind US and China.
You are refusing to recognise reality.
Chinese contributions to scientific space missions had been very modest although am sure they may catch up later.
NASA has 3x the budget of ESA. The question was if the EU method of doing project works and it does in very unambiguous manner.
Five years before Galileo.
> The question was if the EU method of doing project works and it does in very unambiguous manner.
As the EU falls economically and scientifically behinds what used to be our peers, it's obvious that it _doesn't_ work. Refusing to recognise that reality is a spectacular example of the Ostrich effect,
sadly the results are way behind it's peers, but method is great!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-20/russia-s-...
>The US constellation isn’t as accurate as the newer networks, said Roberts, the Sydney-based professor. “It used to be GPS was out in front,” he said. Now, though, the EU’s Galileo is in the lead, with China’s BeiDou close behind, he said.
It's basically Galileo > BeiDou > GPS >>> GLONASS.
Galileo did not start as an EU programme. China used to be member!
What other EU programmes did you have in mind? The EU's efforts not even seem comparable to the European Space Agency (which is not part of the EU) let alone NASA.
GPS+Gailleo is the current SOTA, but it's nonsense to say Galileo is "best".
for navigation using Code method GPS-tier is basically good enough.
for precise measurement you use phase measurement of the signal, and what you care about is good(low) DoP of constellation and amount of satellites within sight-line - not from which system they come(to oversimplfy it a bit)
Ah there are other well working policies in the EU like the migration of skilled workers.
All works well /S
Also, OSNMA is not SA yet.
In 1997, the EU was a global economic and scientific powerhouse. We're talking about the ossification in the last 15-20 years that has not only allowed the US to leapfrog Europe as the largest economy, but China too.
You are bordering on delusional with these comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:European_Space_Agency...
It took too long. around 10-15 years too long.
and that probe is older than quite a big portion of HN users.