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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a good approach to promote it as a German model. But I wonder if it really thinks like the German think. I speculate they just translated texts in other languages, likely English and Chinese, into German.
I just tried to play around with it on my RTX pro 6000 setup, it spends way too many tokens on overthinking stuff even if it’s able to catch the correct approach
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
petition to make this thread the official german jokes thread for this post, it's kind of annoying how everyone feels the need to make a top level comment for their oh-so-great "germans suck" joke.
I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.
I know this is a long standing joke, but I am 27 now, born and raised in Germany, and genuinely never had the opportunity to use a Fax machine. It honestly kind of bums me out because there is something that seems cool about Fax (being fully aware that it should be fully obsolete by now)
I was thinking about the use cases for Germany residents actually, but yes, you're right. A German AI model needs to be able to handle fax machines (there's a bit variety of them) and also needs to handle letters coming home. german image-to-text.
Was expecting that a "sovereign" AI model would at least use their own sovereign language (German) on the website as one of the options. Anyways, all the best and happy reunification day.
This is a blog post by some "random" dude right? The company webpage appears to be German (at least when accessed from Germany: https://aleph-alpha.com/)
German here. We are cheering for Mistral, which is making some good moves before the year is over, and Black Forest Labs for non-coding. But that's about it.
His point about regulation and innovation is great and I wish more people thought like that.
One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.
We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.
The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.
I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.
What matters is to have good sovereign models in 5, 10, 20 years time.
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.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
The next thought is culture-specific workflows, requirements etc that are best trained into weights by people that actually understand those needs.
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.
This means that it’s always on time, it uses acronyms for everything and when there’s a decision to be made, it sets up a committee.
Tell that to Deutch Bahn.
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
Yeah. It’s a German model.
Then what does it good at? Sending faxes?
How is a 27B dense model bigger than a 78B MoE?
One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.
We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.
The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.
I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.