What LLM isn't forced into a specific language? That'd be a weird language model no one could understand, you need to chose at least one language, ideally the same as the creators speak.
Besides, there is knowledge that is locked behind languages, there are things known in Portuguese that aren't known in other languages, and the same for other languages too. More accessibility to those ideas wouldn't hurt.
To my knowledge, all major LLMs are multilingual. This article could really have used an evaluation of existing models' European Portuguese capabilities.
yeah, they seem all confined to being an American-consultant-Chinese-authoritarian split personality with broad second language capabilities. I suppose they become too incoherent otherwise.
E.g. gemma3:4b can fake simple conversations in several european languages, including portuguese, swedish and finnish.
It's just a database. If you push text in one language into it, it'll likely crap out stuff in that same language, unless the system prompt that also goes in with your query causes it not to.
Europe always has a thing for their languages. They think many languages make them stronger while spending billions in system loss due to communication barriers. It is obvious they will try to do the same with LLMs and call it the next best thing since bread and butter.
I went to JCON EUROPE this year. The amount of "Europe this" "Europe that" "sovereign this, sovereign that" is mind boggling and just a waste of time and money. The regular people know this and thus left the conferences mid way. But somehow the people "in charge" really need to push this. Same thing here.
There's an obvious advantage to everyone speaking the same language - although perhaps real-time translation with LLMs and hardware like the Timekettle will reduce this problem. Personally, I wouldn't really care if that language were English or Mandarin Chinese tbh.
Training an entire LLM model for each language is going to be incredibly expensive and likely a waste of resources. Keep in mind that all the big LLMs can already speak these languages anyway - this effort is just to make a 'pure' Portuguese LLM.
Nobody is saying you have to swap your culture for English. You can have English as the mandatory language for tech and business across the EU, while still keeping your language and culture for your education, leisure, festivities, art, media, etc. This way everyone is happy. But countries like France would rather detonate its entire nuclear arsenal rather than accepting official use of English on its own soil.
As long as resources are spent across the EU to account for every language and bureaucracy, we'll keep falling behind internationally, and the only winners will be the bureaucrats, notaries, lawyers, consultants, translators, etc. which would be fine if this were preserving culture like you said in the beginning, but it isn't, it's just preserving friction, segmentation and bureaucracy.
We need another Concord moment. What's wild is that Concord was made via international cooperation, before the EU was even a thing. So whatever the EU is doing to improve things, it's either not good, not enough, or not working. I hope this improves but knowing how petty some EU states are about things being done their way, I doubt it.
Others said a lot already. But yes, go full on English for all official and business needs. Endure a few years of hardship and everyone will come out stronger. Europe can attract so much top talents over night just by this one single step and also save an insane amount of money/resources that can be directed elsewhere.
Besides, there is knowledge that is locked behind languages, there are things known in Portuguese that aren't known in other languages, and the same for other languages too. More accessibility to those ideas wouldn't hurt.