How true is this statement: "He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language."

I thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the language or quality, so his take sounds like an opinion formed in the early days of generally available LLMs.

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WatchDog 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

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black_puppydog 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I have to remind them every time lest they come back with "uh, didn't find anything relevant, here take some hallucinations instead."

So, given the anglo-centrism of current models, my confidence in American providers giving any shits about non-american users/use-cases is pretty low. And lower the smaller the language community is.

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hombre_fatal 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

If you’re doing this on a daily basis, then you should have an AGENTS.md that accumulates directional instructions like this.

This is how you use the tool correctly.

There’s this weird pattern I’ve noticed where people expect LLMs to require zero effort or proficiency on their part, and when the LLM isn’t perfect without it, of course it wasn’t; LLMs suck.

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coliveira 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The issue is that French, Italian, African, Japanese people shouldn't have the inconvenience of instructing the LLM tool to get the basic facts about their own culture. They should use an LLM that has already been trained like that by default. Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American. If I go to Google for example I want to get facts about my own country in my own language.

	▲	cortesoft 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Wouldn't those people be asking the questions in their own language in the first place? The model will reply in the language you use. This thread is about people asking for information about a language that is not the one they are messaging the LLM in
	▲	instagraham an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

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andai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak).

So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please."

I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Time to fix it but it's still there.

	▲	apple2026 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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a2128 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool's move

	▲	SOLAR_FIELDS 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's also a bit funny because Norway definitely has enough money to hire a team of Anthropic's best to go out there and train them a model that does whatever they want. They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor.

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, was about to comment that too, instead of training a new model and new weights exclusively for Norwegian (and expecting/wanting every other small/medium-sized country to do the same) which seems infinity harder, they could have made high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English, and making it all public. I guess there still would be a worry that it'd be counted as "less important" compared to other history, news and culture about other countries.

	▲	makeitdouble 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English You make it sound like an easier task than training an LLM. I'd argue it's not obvious, and would assume the contrary.

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electroglyph 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

absolutely. somebody online was wanting an LLM with Georgian language support, and that's exactly what i suggested: start digitizing Georgian text.

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_cs2017_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why go to the expense...

Answer: idiocy of decision makers and the desire to get resources by those who created the proposal.

I assumed Scandinavia has better decision processes but apparently I was wrong.

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amarant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not remotely true in my estimation. I don't really speak Norwegian, but I do speak Swedish(which means I mostly understand Norwegian as they're very similar). Every model I've tried speaking Swedish to does it perfectly. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for Norwegian already

	▲	mistrial9 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		different models have been very different in this way.. almost ten years ago the French made a very large effort to capture languages.. the release notes I read at the time IIR had quite a few languages from South Asia / India, and in Africa. The language that was prominently missing was German IIR. I cannot say for the 2025-2026 models since so much has happened.. but models are not equal.

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alliao 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah and alignment is all about how to be less evil which is no easy job... I can just imagine Chinese LLM renders 1989 tianmen square as an incident orchestrated by CIA which CCP successfully thwarted etc etc

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orbital-decay 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures, so it's untrue at least for the "any" qualifier. Performance is barely affected or might be even better sometimes. However English patterns can subtly leak into native patterns of other languages. It's obviously very different for low-resource languages, but to improve them you need more data, not a new model.

	▲	Barrin92 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures strong disagree on that one. As a German interacting with ChatGPT, even in German it gives me the feeling of talking to the Pluribus people, which reminds me of an anecdote of Walmart failing in Germany because people were freaked out by the constantly upbeat, smiling employees. Understanding a culture is a very different task than translating the syntax of a text, and these systems might be capable of syntactic fluency but they do not really understand culture. You have to metaphorically abuse these models until they stop sounding like the crossover of a HR department person and a Mormon missionary