EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.

> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.

[1]: http://www.plattmaster.de/plattoew.htm

Not only on the language but also in gastronomy and architecture. When I see old towns in UK I usually think about Dutch towns but just without any biking infrastructure.

If you've ever read anything written in old English, it's a even closer to Dutch.

Well, this was 4 days ago, Spain in talks with Germany regarding the addition of official languages:

https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boos...

They could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.

Is English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.

Including the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland.

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/no...

Haha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.

Oops, accidentally made the model speak Limburgish.

I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.

Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.

Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.

Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.

Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.

On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.

Yes, there's plenty of Maltese spoken and listened to.

I was surprised to hear Maltese radio stations played in taxis, while visiting Malta just a few weeks back

Read with English pronunciation, closest would be mar-sa-shlock.

Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.

There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.

Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.

Wikipedia says it's "Malti"

'ish' is a pretty universal english suffix. So Spanish is just "españ-ish".

I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.

I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world

Only if we have a few Maltesers first

See the section "historical dispute".

I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.

It is just one of the theories, there is no clear evidence to suggest that Baltic and Slavic were the same language thousands of years ago.

Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.

Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.

I took part in application for EU grants a few times and our company group did it many times over the years.

It's bureaucracy, often bordering with stupidity. You may need advisors to navigate all their forms & processes. But it certainly isn't "pals-only" type of deal.

On the other hand - is it harder than getting VC funding? For seasoned founder with reputation - probably. For fresh startup - probably not.

Of course there is red tape. EU funding comes from taxpayer money and we want it to be spent wisely. The red tape is precisely to prevent it from being funneled to pals. EU has funded quite a few free software projects so it's not like the red tape is an insurmountable burden: https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/europes-digital-future-spells...

It's not even close to how he described it.

Yep, VCs don't exist here. Plus the absurd starting costs, it's like what, 20k to set up a GmbH?

Where in Europe and where in the US? You probably started one in the easiest US state to do so. Did you try starting one in the easiest EU state? Otherwise we already can't take things very seriously.

Secondly, what's easier besides VC funding? If it's VC funding, the disparity there has nothing to do with regulations - guess how much VC funding the non-EU rest of the world gets.

What would you want to see changed to consider coming back?

> but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here

Which part is easier? That you have 50 different states with slightly varying laws to consider (e.g. Californian Data protection)? That you have a byzantine system of "benefits" to choose and manage?

And compared to where? Germany or Estonia or Sweden or Spain? The complexities will vary wildly depending on the country (kind of like in the US, where lots of companies pick the state to base themselves in based on the combination of favourable laws and precedents and taxes).

One fairly large factor is that even though English is much more common today, you just can't operate (depending on the product of course) in many countries without having customer support, documentation etc in the local language.

Money.

Why work in the "europoor" countries when you can go to america and earn megabucks.

> Okay, what is the limiting factor

A few.

A big part is that the EU is a collection of countries that (with very few exceptions) have different languages and laws. For a company to serve Spain and France, for instance, it would need to translate everything, hire local lawyers and customer support agents. Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.

This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.

Then, there's the capital markets, no denying that. The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet. Some of it definitely a bubble / unrealistic, but that doesn't matter. But in part it's because of the size of the total potential market that this is justified.

Education / national mythology also plays a part, I think (this is pure conjecture now). In the US, the "American Dream", "everyone can make it" etc is heavily ingrained. It propagates through the world with the help of Hollywood and other American cultural exports. In most EU countries, there isn't such a heavy emphasis on independence and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". "Hustle culture" isn't a thing. So for most people, it isn't something that comes naturally to them to start a company and work 100 hour weeks to be big and rich and successful and famous.

That's not to say there aren't such people, I went to 42 and have been to Station F and know some people in that universe. A decent proportion of my classmates wanted to make their startup and make it big, and some did end up starting their own companies.

> I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.

Capital controls are protectionist measures, but anyway, no.

> Okay, what is the limiting factor?

Let's look at which countries have a significant local software industry compared to population size.

- China

- US

- Korea

- You can argue for Japan and India but that's already starting to stretch.

- Yup, effectively no where else. Even in an "out of the way" place like Myanmar everyone uses Meta, with a nice little genocide to show for it. Sure, in Vietnam they use Zalo, and other places have a few other local players. But most of the famous US tech apps are dominant.

Is the EU the outlier here? No. Everywhere else US tech dominates. Meta, Netflix, Apple, Google, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, Match Group, Paypal, Amazon, and on and on. They don't just dominate the EU, they dominate the world.

Except for the countries I named above, where at least some of the markets that US big tech competes in, instead have bigger local players. And even there, guess what?

Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries, all the way from China, then Korea, then India/Japan, and then everywhere else! Who woulda thought!

Why does Korea have much less US tech dominance than, say, Germany? Despite German companies theoretically having a big advantage: the German public is 100x more privacy conscious than the Korean one, and much less trusting of US companies.

I can tell you that it's not less regulations; Korea's GDPR is much more onerous than the EU's and so are investment regulations. On every single regulatory aspect, German software startups have it easier. But they were never protected. US tech was allowed to waltz in, dump their products - that's what they did, it's hilarious how now China "dumping" EVs and solar is suddenly an issue when it's exactly the strategy that US tech continues to this day; the AI companies are doing it right now! And the Korean companies were protected. Both by the rules burden, that local companies had to deal with too, along with intentional protectionism.

When it comes to solar and EVs, we all understand that a foreign country dumping their goods kills local industry. It's the exact same with software.

But then half of HN has millions on the bank exactly thanks to the above - this is where all those fat SV salaries have come from - so I do get the lack of desire to understand it.

I literally quoted the paragraph from this link in the tweet I provided: Edit: lol, I didn't, I quoted it from a policy document, not from press release. However, my point stands:

--- start quote ---

Apply AI Strategy

The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture. It will also support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with their specific needs and help Industries integrate AI into their operations.

--- end quote ---

I also quoted a paragraph from a document I will find when I'm not on mobile.

Levels literally wants to train AI Slop: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1981499900266193028

--- start quote ---

Train a foundational model for AI photos of people

--- end quote ---

You are wrong in that you think the hierarchies stem specifically from feudalism, but you are absolutely correct in that these hierarchies exist and are deeply entrenched. Sweden and Germany have one of the lowest percentages of self-made vs. inherited fortunes in the western world. Actually some tax policies in the US enable much more upward mobility, such as real estate taxation and 401k-like vehicles.

> France and there will just be massive swathes of land owned by the nobility or 'former' nobility

Yeah, no, this isn't even remotely true.

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I'd use a model trained on a targeted and curated data set over one trained on all the crap on the internet any day.

You can also correctly bias your sampling so that when selecting new training instances each language is chosen equally. Generally the diversity of data is good, unless that data is "wrong" which, ironically, is probably most of the internet, but I digress.

The difference ia larger than let's say just a "dialect". They really are different languages, even though we generally understand each other quite well (younger generations less so). I've heard it's about as different as e. g. Danish and Swedish - not sure if that comparison is helpful.

>I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.

So is your hypothesis that the total market cap of EU tech companies is something like 50,60,70, etc. % of total US tech marketcap? Something significantly different than the ~10% implied by that figure (largest us companies 10x largest EU companies). And it's just more broadly distributed?

Hard to find data on this but this is showing EU tech market cap at 3.2T. https://www.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapters/outcomes

Whereas this is saying the US "megacaps" ($200B+) are at 21T. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/tech-megacaps-worth-market-c...

Which puts the entire EU tech market at 15% of the US megacaps. Not even the entire market.

They are already CIA'ed on a regular basis for much less than that.

It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.