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Multilingual, open source and a 'distinctly European perspective': Germany's Fraunhofer Institute's OpenGPT-X research project releases large language model (www.iis.fraunhofer.de)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

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?