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.

The first thought that comes to mind is biases that are baked into the weights.

The next thought is culture-specific workflows, requirements etc that are best trained into weights by people that actually understand those needs.

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.

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.

amazing to see blunt unfiltered commentary about making war and society level propaganda as important and necessary for a political state.

Ford started mass producing cars in 1913, and yet there are plenty of car companies that started production 20+ years later and are still relevant.

> VW

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.

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.

When you mention a window of opportunity, what do you mean by that? A window of opportunity for what?

And who are you, exactly?

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