https://x.com/pashmerepat/status/1946392456456732758/photo/1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43466672

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

--- 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

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 :)

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.

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..)

- 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.

We're hiring a...

* (Senior) Full stack engineer

* (Senior) AI engineer

* (Senior) SRE

* Chief of Staff/COO (On-Site only)

Contact us directly: info [at] ellamind [dot] com

The Phi-3 models are great though, especially the vision model has great potential for low latency applications (like robotics?)...

One additional argument that's mostly missed: every fission reactor is only economically viable (if it is at all) when discounting the implicit state guarantee, that's necessary as no insurer will take on the risk. Adding a theoretical risk premium paid by taxpayers to the calculation, nuclear will never be competitive.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/ [2] https://youtu.be/zjkBMFhNj_g?si=M6pRX66NrRyPM8x-

EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood as you asked about papers, not general intros. I don´t think that reading papers is the best way to "catch up" as the pace is rapid and knowledge very decentralized. I can confirm what Andrej recently wrote on X [3]:

"Unknown to many people, a growing amount of alpha is now outside of Arxiv, sources include but are not limited to:

- https://github.com/trending

- HN

- that niche Discord server

- anime profile picture anons on X

- reddit"

[3] https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1733968385472704548

Addtionally:

> First, we did not generate offspring using the cessation males. Therefore, we do not know if the sperm noncoding RNA signature we identified correlates with changes in offspring fetoplacental growth or if the resulting offspring would develop normally. However, as significant differences in the ncRNA signature of EtOH-cessation sperm and epididymal mtDNAcn remained, we speculate that abstinence for 1 month is insufficient for the epigenetic memory of paternal alcohol exposure to abate, likely due to the ongoing stress associated with alcohol withdrawal.45, 46 Furthermore, we acknowledge that our analysis does not distinguish between changes in sperm ncRNAs that are causal drivers of altered epigenetic programming in the next generation versus abnormalities that are merely additional symptoms of alcohol-induced stress.

I´m all for science on alcohol abuse and effects of moderate drinking, but this doesn't look like solid science for me (especially as afaik, there is still very few reliable, double-blind controlled evidence on epigenentic effects at all).

But please correct me if I´m wrong (worked with biotech companies on admission studies for several years but no biologist myself).

I am just in the process of switching back to Chrome, as Firefox got continuously worse over time. Can't handle lots of tabs, crashes/freezes randomly, weird UI bugs... It's just very disappointing :/.

Compared to the original Orca model and method which spawned many of the current SotA OSS models, Orca 2 models seem to perform underwhelming, below outdated 13b models and below Mistral 7b base models (e.g. [1]; didn't test myself yet, ymmv).

[1] https://twitter.com/abacaj/status/1727004543668625618?t=R_vV...

"I benchmarked on SAT reading, which is a nice human reference for reasoning ability. Took 3 sections (67 questions) from an official 2008-2009 test (2400 scale) and got the following results, here a SAT-like test:

- GPT3.5 - 690 (10 wrong) - GPT4 - 770 (3 wrong) - GPT4-turbo (one section at time) - 740 (5 wrong) - GPT4-turbo (3 sections at once, 9K tokens) - 730 (6 wrong)"

Source: https://twitter.com/wangzjeff/status/1721934560919994823?t=P...

But sure, the study design and primary/secondary endpoints are always levers to increase likelihood of admission. There are often long discussions with the FDA and other regulators on how the endpoints and study population should look like.