The big question is who is going to fund it? Is it tax payers money? If so how can they guarantee it’s not going to be another waste and corrupted disaster. Also EU is already late to the AI race and by the time the lawmakers starts to think about this, it would be game over

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impossiblefork 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think the chips alone are 10B minimum. It'd be way bigger than CERN.

Provided that the systems work, they can at least be repurposed to other things. If the organizations that are to train public LLMs can't do it, we can rent the system out to Mistral or something.

So I think something like 5B, starting with 10B to get started, in public money per year, the chip firms are private, some of the LLM firms will be private, but the system is available to train European LLMs-- that's I think a realistic approach.

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sajithdilshan 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

The biggest problem with public money funded endeavours is corruption. At the end of the day most of the people would be there for the pay check and even if nothing is delivered after burning billions of euros, nobody would be held accountable.

That’s why I think it’s not going to be successful with public funding. What EU needs is structural unpopular reforms. Reduce taxes so companies and top talent would have an incentive to choose EU over US. Reform employment laws so people can be fired for being pencil pushers and lacking off. Relax privacy and copyright laws so the data can be used to train the model. Completely repel all laws that create a bureaucratic nightmare for startups. Today all these suggestions would be a complete no go in any European country, but that’s the hard reform EU needs like yesterday even to have a chance to compete against US and China.

	▲	impossiblefork a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, of course. I think there's nothing special about public funding though. The field is so competitive that people will be mad if a competitive model is not achieved, making corruption more damaging to the organizations. There would also be some internal competition. There are after all several EU LLM/AI/etc. firms that would probably try to use this infrastructure.