Open Euro LLM: Open LLMs for Transparent AI in Europe

"It works!" is the only thing that will be visible on web page after hundreds of milions will be burned. I’m observing few of such „unprecedented” cooperation projects from EU funds. A lot of meetings, a lot of managers, plenty of very unskilled people creating mess and few names doing presentations so companies will believe everybody know what are they doing. Same from company side - they need being in those projects to comply with stupid EU rules about being eco.

Ball of mud.

As someone who has lived through Eurostar and Horizon 2020, and who has participated as both a researcher and corporate partner, I can say: it does not work.

Unless by work you mean "successfully passed the post-project review by non-experts based on a bunch of slides"

Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.

My experience from these projects is the opposite. The projects are always secondary priorities for participants, and the difficulty of coordinating some dozen entirely separate organisations towards something actually productive is immense. In practice each participant independently spends the money they get on something lightly relevant, and the occasional coordination meetings are spent on planning how to fulfill the reporting requirements of the grant.

Business and research are difficult enough even when done by tightly knit teams and constantly tested against real world systems and customer feedback. The idea that a hodgepodge of organisations can achieve poorly defined yet aspirational goals on a low budget is massively misguided.

> I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail.

This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon, because I don't think any independent observer could look at Horizon projects and say they just work.

Having worked on an FP7 programme myself and having a family member involved in project audits, I’d say some skepticism is warranted—particularly regarding the incentives that attract private sector partners and the talent they actually allocate once funds are secured.

Funding is tied to employee qualifications and effectively subsidises salaries, which creates room for misalignment. No-shows of allocated employees were not uncommon, since a company willing to accept lower-quality deliverables can assign junior employees to do the work at a fraction of the cost, while the salary difference for their PhDs simply becomes added margin.

Can you tell me please what you worked on and where I can see the output? I’ve been adjacent to these kind of efforts and the only thing I can say is that I’m highly skeptical of your claims.

In the case of Quaero [1] "it did not work". Sure, all involved parties were praising the project and by constantly shifting goalposts they could label it a success, but in the end it was a huge waste of money, sucked in by the usual suspects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

While I do think EU grants are a good thing, I'm sceptic about these too-big-to-fail multi-national projects. I still remember the Human Brain Project.

> They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.

I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior.

Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.

> The project aims to create a repository of digital copies of around 3 million slides covering a range of disease areas. This repository will then be used to develop artificial intelligence tools that could aid in the analysis of slides.

€70 MM to get the digital copies of 3 million slides. Speaks for itself.

So, if one has a well thought-through idea, what is the process of getting the resources ($$$) from OpenEuroLLM and the compute from EuroHPC? How do I become a partner as a long-standing engineer with plenty of industry practice in research and development?

I am asking this because I never really understood how EU funds are working, they always seemed to me as there's a lot of gate keeping.

I think no one believes that R1 costs $5.5m from scratch. People in this project (most, not all) are very aware of the realities in training and are very well connected in the US as well. Besides Leonardo there are JUWELS, LUMI & other which can be used for ablations and so on.

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 :)

> If people in charge of this project actually believe R1 costs $5.5M to build from scratch, it's already over.

wdym?

In other words, to be successful you need to be able to break the law and lobby the government? That is indeed the USA mindset, or should I say United Corporations of America? I'm happy EU is not USA.

I agree that the announcement should´ve talked more about goals and performance than regulatory stuff ;-).

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.

> China, all you need is some money and smart people

No way

might be debatable - but I tend to agree with Dario Amodei on this; my guess is that R1 is 7-10 months behind the internal frontier at the big labs, while having a few small novel tricks. (But i might err, will be interesting to see the development going forward)

> legislation is kind of the point of a government in the first place

I would personally consider legislation to be but one means to an end, with the point of a (democratic) government actually being to ensure stability and prosperity for its citizens.

In that framework, "leading with legislation" doesn't make any sense—you can lead with results, but the legislation is not itself a result! Lead with development or lead with standard of living or lead with civil rights, but don't lead with legislation.

Your formulation sounds like politician's logic: "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it". Legislation as an end in itself. Very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y

> They can use the same frontier level open source model as everyone else, and meanwhile, they can stay on top of harmful uses like social or credit scoring.

We are dependent on models created by USA and Chinese companies for access to the technology that seems to be the next internet - while the entire world is accelerating hard towards protectionism and tariff wars.

What could possibly go wrong

I partially agree with you. The only problem is that these markets are highly monopolistic, and we will be creating another technological dependency on the US.

Deepseek didn't show anything except the compute cost of final model. We don't know how much data collection costed, how much unethical data like copyrighted data or OpenAI's data is needed, the cost of experiments etc.

> Creating a model that will match whatever current model is considered frontier level is not that hard for an entity like the EU.

If they have this as their top priority and allotted few billion dollars then sure. Not in the current form where the people involved are only involved for publication, not doing hard engineering things that takes months or years and they could do the same thing in OpenAI or Deepseek for like $1 million salary which both of them pay.

> lead in legislation

> legislation is kind of the point of a government

As an American, most of this post reads like doublespeak satire. I guess it's not, but just to put a transatlantic pov here.

I'll add a sports metaphor for good measure: in order to become expert football players, we'll get tickets to watch the best teams play.

The trap that these EU projects typically fall into is that they burn all of the grant funding on paying politically connected consultants to write reports. No one gets around to building an MVP.

On what basis are you are stating this? I'm asking because I have been involved in another project like these (15M budget) and the main issue was the lack of computing resources allocation, because no one thought about it (true story).

>Because Europe does not have enough money.

They seem to have enough to send overseas and to spend on illegal economic migrants.

>Private sector often does not fund projects like these as they have bad return on investment.

Then why does the private sector in the US fund projects like these?

DeepSeek had plenty of R&D expertise which were not included in the (declared) model training cost. Here we are talking about building something nearly from scratch, even if there is an open source starting point you still need the infrastructure, expertise and people to make it work, which with that budget are going to be hard to secure. Moreover these projects take months and months to get approved, meaning that this one was conceived long before DeepSeek, thus highlighting the original disalignment between the goal and the budget. DeepSeek might have changed the scenario (I hope so) but it would be just a lucky ex-post event… not a conscious choice behind that budget.

DeepSeek probably spent closer to two billion on hardware. And then there’s the energy cost of numerous runs, staff costs, all of that. The 5.5m cost was basically misleading info, maybe used strategically to create doubt in the US tech industry or for DeepSeek’s parent hedge fund to make money off shorts.

https://semianalysis.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-debates/

Anything more then a powerpoint coming out of this would be a generous expectation.

> ai bias popup

It's all fun and games until AI models decide your type of people (blonde/brown/from that zip code/with that type of last name/went to that school/worked there in the past/have those facial features) are "bad" or "untrustworthy" or don't deserve healthcare or to be hired for that job or get a mortgage.

"AI" bias has existed for as long as we have had "AI" in its various forms. Remember ML algorithms classifying black people as monkeys? And the "solution" was to make them unable to find monkeys or primates. That one got big because of the implication.. when it's "people with the last name Smith being dumb", nobody will care

The alternative is businesses are not held to account. I'd much rather have a cookie pop-up and GDPR notices than businesses have no guard rails against moves that are not in the interest of the user/customer.

Update: tried a couple of Dutch (my native language) queries, and it worked well. No issues whatsoever. Which is no surprise, given Dutch <-> English and vice versa translations often work very well.

Ok I see we're very far from being on the same page.

Multilingualism in context of language models means something more than English, because that's what every model trained on the internet already knows. There aren't any I'm aware of that don't, since it would be exceedingly hard to exclude it from the dataset even if you wanted to for some reason. This is like the "what about men's rights" when talking about women's rights... yes we know, they're already entirely ubiquitous.

But more properly I would consider LLM multilingualism straight up knowing all languages. We benchmark models on the MMLU and similar collections that contain all fields of knowledge known to man, so I would say it's reasonable to expect fluency of all languages as well.

I've been using mistral for most of January at the same rate as chatgpt before. I decided to pay for it as its per token (in and out) and the bill came yesterday... A whopping 1 cent. Thats probably rounded up.

> Train an LLM with text books and other legal books

Without licenses to the books, they are just as illegal (and maybe even moreso) than web content.

Open AI fed their original model Anna’s archive for breakfast.

My own experience mainly, only Gemma seems to have been any good for Slavic languages so far, and only the 27B when unquantized is reliable enough to be in any way usable.

Ravenwolf posts tests on his German benchmarks every so often in locallama and most models seem to do well enough, but I've heard some claims from people about Mistral's being their favorite models in German anyhow. And I think Mistral-Large scores higher than Llama-405B in French on lmsys and that's at least something one would expect from a French company.

Yes I think small languages which have a total corpus of maybe a few hundred million tokens total have no chance of producing a coherent model without synthetic data. And using synthetic data from existing models trained on all public (and less public) data is enough of a legally gray area that I wouldn't expect this project to consider it, so it's doomed before it even starts.

Something like 4o is so perfect in most languages that one could just make an infinite dataset from it and be done with it. I'm not sure how OAI managed it tbh.

> our daughter's school has to ask specific consent if they can make photos and where they can post them

The result of this is we don't see anything out daughter does in school because school decides to comply with draconian regulation by saying "fuck it". The same applies to having parents present daily: we don't touch the grounds of the school unless we make a formal request, we don't see the teacher everyday, we don't hear how the day went from professionals who actually spent time with them. This is all 100% the opposite of our experience outside of Europe before moving and I'm comparing public school system in a third world country to an European one. It's just an anecdote but it hasn't been more clear to me how much in a death spiral the EU is than the experience we currently are having