…and a team with experience and the hardware and the workflows to do this at scale, repeatedly to avoid drift, with proper infrastructure for evaluation and testing, and all of this work is somehow the core domain of your business.
Oh, that’s true. But when you come to a foreign country, you’ll have to recognise its laws. And if that country happens to have ratified the ICC, and the ICC has a warrant for you, well then you’re bound for trial.
Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
In Germany chancellor is a character who holds a parliamentary majority, and they creativity can and do introduce laws against the will of the majority of German voters.
You seem to have the mistaken belief that democracy is the rule of the majority, which it is not. It is much rather the rule of the compromise, so whether the majority of the population does or does not want something is less relevant than wether a) that majority can organise a parliamentary majority too, and b) whether that popular desire is reconcilable with the law.
Besides, Germany is a representative democracy. There is no unified “will of the people” that isn’t manifested in the existing constitution of the parliament already. And if that’s what you’re hinting at: No matter how often AfD may claim to represent the will of the people, they decidedly do not do so; not even in Saxony-Anhalt.
It's funny how CDU and SPD always find a way to do something against the will of the citizens and find a good explanation. Whether their rule was good or bad is not subjective, average German lives much worse than in before Merkel era, and things are not improving.
You may point to the AfD, but they are just a boogeyman. They don't rule anywhere in Germany, and yet, the government use the scaremongering against the AfD to cover own wrongdoings. At this point, it's like Big Brother blaming the East Asian Empire (or was it Oceania?) and Goldberg for his own faults.
1984 should have been a warning, but Germany (and the EU in general) is using it more and more as an instruction manual.
Rarely the chancellor’s party holds the absolute majority so it’s not as simple as in countries with a the-winner-takes-it-all system.
Mostly there are coalitions that prevent too bad laws.
Sometimes that can also block good ones. Thanks FDP. I hope you are gone for good from any government for being one of the true ideology driven parties in Germany.
Literal millions of people live in New York, Athens, London, Berlin, Rome, and tons of other places with various grades of decay visible everywhere. That’s what we usually call a place having a soul.
I don't get what your point is. Are you saying people don't fix and improve their homes?
Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?
It's very interesting to observe the different perspectives in this thread, which seem to be mutually exclusive. When talking about urban decay, some people think of an artist's loft in a run-down brick factory from the 19th century with Graffiti on the walls and exposed steel beams, others of potholes, trash, and overdue maintenance.
Every data point you keep can be leaked, or abused, and has to be protected (at least in jurisdictions that don't just go eeh, whatever when it comes to protecting their citizens). There are tons of scenarios where I don't want your IP address, ideally I'd not even like to store your password. The more you store, the more you paint crosshairs on your back for hackers. You need to adhere to regulations, anonymise or delete it as customers leave, and solve problems like "should backups be immutable, or pruned from data I should no longer retain". At a certain size, you even need to defend on the inside to avoid more ruthless managers from abusing data you have been entrusted with for illegal analysis or data sales to analytics companies.
If your view on data protection or privacy is "I don't care about it, my users can go to hell as long as they pay"--then sure, this whole discussion probably seems pointless to you. But otherwise, storing and handling as little data as you can probably resonates with you as a good solution to many problems.
"I don't care about it, my users can go to hell as long as they pay"
The above is also a good reason why you wouldn't want to get any of their data.
Users who are not consumers are of no interest, and users who become customers will give the necessary data to make a purchase without any need to spy on them.
Aleph Alpha is just a sad joke by now. The talent isn't there anymore, they never managed to catch up to the other labs, failed to deliver on several projects, and by now are just a cash grab for the investors.
Only if you think in terms of short term gains, but thinking in the long run, doesn't really matter if these models are crap today, all models will eventually be obsolete, unless we plateau hard on every aspect of the tech.
What matters is to have good sovereign models in 5, 10, 20 years time.
I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.
Just open weights are not enough, I think as a nation state you'd at least want a whole sovereign training pipeline. Otherwise you are stuck when Kimi K4 stops releasing their weights.
But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.
You want to, of course. There are several multi-billion dollar programs to subsidize fabs starting european offshoots. But so far not very successful, and it's not like one endeavour is blocking the other here.
We have lots of capable open weights models, but very few have actual datasets and pipelines open for reproducibility. This is a major issue that even if big companies addressed, policies could well just change, as you also acknowledge.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
> Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
Yeah we can, we do it all the time. Nothing in society works without relying on private actors to keep doing what they have always done. Unless you go full soviet command economy, which in fact works worse.
Society and the private sector cooperates, but any technical dependency is detrimental because of monopolization of interests. You don't need to go full soviet, but knowledge in general must be socialized, that includes access to technology.
We literally grant 20 year monopolies on technologies to their inventors and have for centuries and it's fine. The entire economy runs on chips made by like, 3 foundries using lithography machines made by 1 company. I think you are overstating the necessity.
Autarky would be a national security disaster manifested. You can't be a modern prosperous society and not rely on either trade nor private enterprise.
Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.
Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.
Because if you can't build the model from scratch you don't have a model. Open weights are nice but fixed in time. This isn't a technology that stays static, it improves, and sovereignty means being able to continue to improve independently.
Open weight and -source models aren't without biases. Giving a model away for free would be a good way to distribute an agenda. With a sovereign model you can at least control the agenda and align it with your values.
For the same reason it didn't matter whether coach makers were able to build carriages that went 5% faster when the automobile was introduced, and for the same reason it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time. Their window of opportunity will be long gone and the momentum elsewhere; most probably, the market will even have evolved further by then.
AI is here to stay - will be around for hundreds/millions of years. Whether company A is a few years ahead of company B is irrelevant. In 10 years time company A, who started the industry, may be gone completely - also irrelevant.
VW EV sales are up in South America, Canada and Europe. It's true that their total global numbers are down, but that's mainly because they lost like 30% in China. Which obviously sucks considering how big the Chinese market is, but then, the Chinese market is it's own sort of thing.
Don't get me wrong, I think your point is valid for a lot of traditional European car brands. Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand, but I suspect VW is one of the brands that will do just fine. Especially with the id polo coming out next year.
> Mercedes is certainly one of them which has lost it's "our engines are nicer" brand
Mercedes is doing something interesting with its level 3 DRIVE PILOT. As far as I know, it's the only autonomous driving system/auto pilot on the market that actually takes full legal responsibility for the vehicle and its actions. If you put a new Mercedes in self driving and it crashes, Mercedes takes full liability.
Yes, it currently only goes up to 100 kph and it will buzz you to take over if it can't guarantee prefect safety anymore. But this approach is really the only one I think is interesting. All this self driving shit is worthless to me if I'm still liable in the end. So I respect Mercedes for putting their money where their mouth is.
maybe to have a global market share, but there are plenty of players that picked up pace when they “decided” to build cars (Japan? South Korea? and many more) or electronics. Having a good sovereign model in 10/20 years might not need having the absolute best there is, and perhaps future optimizations will make building one not as prohibitively expensive as it is today. Keeping some sort of homebrew capacity now is definitely better than having none
> it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time
I mean, given the fuel prices it would be very nice, alongside more charging infrastructure in the EU. :(
Not to detract from the overall point, though to be honest, it's probably worthwhile to do improvements and refinements with the current technology, even if the future holds something vastly different. Both cause of gaining expertise and also maybe an improvement or two along the way, that might carry forward.
Like I haven't seen many steam locomotives around and for me the difference between saturated steam engines and superheated ones isn't very material in regards to transportation, but the latter is used in modern turbines.
There are many "steam" locomotives around in China and India, but you just don't see them.
Coal is burned and converted to electricity in coal power plants and the electricity is used to move the electric locomotives around.
Even with distribution losses, the thermal efficiency of coal power plant -> electric network -> electric train is much higher then the old steam locomotives (Only about 5% of the potential energy produced by a steam locomotive’s boiler is translated to the wheels in the form of actual driving power.)
Someone mad at this random guy who can't even fix his de domains SSL cert (cloudflare of course) destructively shitting on any efforts at doing something good.
Someone that builds things instead of merely "managing".
Someone pissed by this exact style of default github pfp business-person ruining this country. If they haven't left for SV already, in which case I hope that they will stay there.
So many assumptions there. For one, I’m absolutely proud to be founding engineer of a German company that’s staying one, and I’m the first to make a stand for European technology. You just won’t get a high five from me for a company that isn’t managed well, does not deliver on their promises, and ultimately doesn’t really serve the goal of European AI independence well.
And this isn't ad-hominem for lack of factual critic. The personal stuff _is_ the reason. How else do you call out someone driven by ego without mentioning them and their ego?
The guy is only ego. There is no substance to attack.
this is, because it can mean so much stuff that you can't really tell you are calling out their "ego" or just trolling.
Until you can at least open yourself to the possibility that there are better more inviting ways to talk to people online, you'd think this is just the natural way people talk online, but I'd say it's not. It's just an aesthetic choice.
If you truly think that I am the problem deep down in this nested subthread that violates the spirit and letter of the rules of the platform, I have zero faith in the calibration of your perception.
Good, leave faith for God, question everything, but there is room there for improving your communication whether you are ready for this conversation or not
Sure. The founder has left, massive capital has been pumped into the company without real profits ever materialising, there were reports of spurious connections to local politicians, big contracts for government-cleared AI that never turned into an actually useful product, and the only thing that seems to get wheels turning again is the involvement of Cohere.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, I am a big proponent of European independence and technology, but Aleph Alpha never quite managed to live up to their promises (and potential!) A lot of inertia has been silently fizzled out here, and that's sad.
It's not that talent isn't there anymore. It's that retards are at the helm everywhere and therefore talent is running away the first chance they have.
So yeah, not too much enterprise sales experience there for sure.
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