cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5167597
The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: “Teuken-7B” has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.
[…]
The path to using Teuken-7B
Interested developers from academia or industry can download Teuken-7B free of charge from Hugging Face and work with it in their own development environment. The model has already been optimized for chat through “instruction tuning”. Instruction tuning is used to adapt large language models so that the model correctly understands instructions from users, which is important when using the models in practice – for example in a chat application.
Teuken-7B is freely available in two versions: one for research-only purposes and an “Apache 2.0” licensed version that can be used by companies for both research and commercial purposes and integrated into their own AI applications. The performance of the two models is roughly comparable, but some of the datasets used for instruction tuning preclude commercial use and were therefore not used in the Apache 2.0 version.
Download options and model cards can be found at the following link: https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X
This is awesome. Wish the USA could do stuff like this.
The USA can certainly do this, they have all what it takes. Public investments for such stuff will be hard to get in the next four years I guess, but there could be some private initiative?I don’t know the U.S. good enough in that respect, though.
Well, we do have some private companies that are doing things like this, such as Meta with its Llama models and Google with their smaller gemma models. But I would love for there to be some publicly funded options that truly belong to all of us.
Yeah, there are many FOSS organizations in the U.S. like the Open Source Lab by the Oregon State University, the Open Source Software Institute, and many others. I guess they could do it, possibly if some join forces.
Is fraunhofer the group that used to / still do sue other organizations over video codec use? I assumed it was a company but apparently not?
The relevant patents expired a long time ago. MPEG codecs were not free and the research society did sue those who used them without acquiring licenses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_legislation
In response to these licensing costs, ogg Vorbis was developed as a free alternative. However, Fraunhofer also co-developed AAC, which is open source (although patents still protect it and require licensing for redistribution). You may have heard of it if you’re into watching movies.
Not that any of this matters, because as you can read in the excerpt above, Teuken-7B is released as both a research version and a version under the Apache 2.0 license, which permits commercial use and redistribution without any payments to the society.
A “Fraunhofer Society” refers to the overarching organization that manages a network of applied research institutes, while a “Fraunhofer Institute” is a single research unit within that network, focused on a specific area of study like materials science, healthcare, or digital technology; essentially, the Fraunhofer Society is the umbrella organization, and the Fraunhofer Institutes are the individual research centers under its governance.
They are credited with the creation of the MP3 format so maybe that’s where these supposed lawsuits are coming from?
