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Comment by Achterlangs | Hacker News Reader

It is not about the country but the language. Most llms have poor or no support for Dutch.

Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.

There would be a bunch of value in having, say, a good 30B-class model that used my local language as well as it does English. There's lots of cases, especially in the government sphere, where local processing is a requirement and frontier-level capabilities aren't required. Making those cheap to run seems like a fine goal.

Can you provide some examples of these use cases?

Support bots and question answering with access to sensitive pii?

Yes, but what's the point of a support bot that writes good Dutch when it can't follow instructions, doesn't understand the questions or can't solve problems? I might be wrong, but I don't think atm these models have the cognitive ability to perform any task in a satisfactory manner.

As for accessing pii, I imagine the value here is in the fact they're local, which has nothing to do with the "sovereignty" of these models. If anything, a model is more likely to be tricked by a malicious prompt the farther it is from the sota.

A good harness and engineering is important no matter which model you use. But Sovereignty of hosting is also important because without it all pii is being leaked.

There's a large gap between making up words and an actually native text distribution. LLMs have a clear pattern, clear tells, a "feel" in English, and it's normally even more pronounced in non-English languages.

Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.

I didn't notice any of that. Such a bias would be strange, because certainly smaller models don't have the luxury of learning grammar independently: it's still word sequences, and languages are quite well separated.

I don't understand this. Even if that were true (and it isn't in my experience), a model that is trained on a Dutch corpus and arguably "knows Dutch well" but has the reasoning and comprehension abilities of a three year old is useless in any case. I'd rather use a model that can only speak English and put an automatic translator around it.

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