[KeplerBoy]

How true is this statement: "He asserted that any country with its own language that did not have a sovereign LLM trained in that language was at a disadvantage as a globally trained, English-speaking LLM would not know about that country’s history, news and culture that was described in the local language."

I thought all big players already train on basically everything remotely available to them no matter the language or quality, so his take sounds like an opinion formed in the early days of generally available LLMs.

[WatchDog]

If you want LLMs to have knowledge of the Norwegian language, wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available? Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

[black_puppydog]

I task GPT/Claude with researching stuff that pertains to very specific cultural or legal aspects in French politics, on a daily basis. Even though French is a way more common language globally than Norwegian, these models still haven't figured out that, no matter the language I myself speak to them (German or English depending on my mood) their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results. I have to remind them every time lest they come back with "uh, didn't find anything relevant, here take some hallucinations instead."

So, given the anglo-centrism of current models, my confidence in American providers giving any shits about non-american users/use-cases is pretty low. And lower the smaller the language community is.

[KaiserPro]

I've noticed that it also imposes american moral judgements on certain things, even though it reasons (sometimes) in the native language.

I was trying to work out how and when to use swear words, and the relative power index of them. it translated english swear words into the target language then lectured me on not using them.

It took a bunch of prodding for it to actually think as the target language to then get the (mostly) correct response.

[social_quotient]

Would be curious about the model and the prompt for this.

Not kidding at all. I had a similar issue with a project where I needed to classify images into specific demographics, and Gemini, while capable, was entirely not going to do the task… until in my JSON response I left room for it to tell me why this was not a good idea and why it was culturally insensitive. Then boom… full JSON array: hair color, eye color, skin color, fitness level, likely ethnicity, likely country of origin, and about 10 other values.

You’re probably wondering what on earth I was working on. I was matching Ai gen headshots to Ai voices so that in an app the voice picker had human (Ai) faces.

[hombre_fatal]

Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

If you’re doing this on a daily basis, then you should have an AGENTS.md that accumulates directional instructions like this.

This is how you use the tool correctly.

There’s this weird pattern I’ve noticed where people expect LLMs to require zero effort or proficiency on their part, and when the LLM isn’t perfect without it, of course it wasn’t; LLMs suck.

[coliveira]

The issue is that French, Italian, African, Japanese people shouldn't have the inconvenience of instructing the LLM tool to get the basic facts about their own culture. They should use an LLM that has already been trained like that by default. Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American. If I go to Google for example I want to get facts about my own country in my own language.

[cortesoft]

Wouldn't those people be asking the questions in their own language in the first place? The model will reply in the language you use. This thread is about people asking for information about a language that is not the one they are messaging the LLM in

[schubidubiduba]

Even if the model will reply in my language, I often notice it searching in english. Or thinking in english. There's always something lost in translation. Sometimes it's just minor nuances. Other times it mangles the legal facts with those of other countries.

[numpad0]

They always sound like an obnoxious American tourist talking through a translator, the chatbot training dataset is the same and foundation models are always built with >50% American English data for some reason.

[instagraham]

>Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

[TimTheTinker]

> Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American.

Then add top-level instructions saying what country you're from, what country you live in now, and which language you speak. This isn't that hard.

[schubidubiduba]

None of that even addresses the problem described, because none of the languages you mentioned would be French in the described example.

[cubefox]

> Aren’t you already using English in the LLM convo? Telling the model to use French for research or to find resources in French seems like a reasonable step.

Most ordinary people will just use their native language and they have no way of knowing that the model always reasons in English and therefore is strongly biased toward using English search terms. So they don't know they have to remind the model to search in their local language.

[andai]

If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

I have the opposite problem, where I'll ask in English, about something in a foreign country, the results it finds will all be in that foreign language, and the LLM will switch languages and respond in that language (which I don't speak).

So then I have to ask it "can you repeat that in English please."

I keep waiting for the new GPT-Definitelty-AGI-For-Real-This-Time to fix it but it's still there.

[jahller]

> If you ask in French, it searches in French, right?

not necessarily. i often prompt Claude in German and then see the reasoning happening in English. of course it will eventually reply in German, but that does not mean that the tooling in the background was using German.

[lobochrome]

Same for me - I mostly ask stuff in English but sometimes add specific terms or names in Japanese as needed. My Japanese is intermediate, but it will often switch immediately and reply only and entirely in Japanese. I'm pretty sure they have a system prompt with hairline triggers for foreign languages BECAUSE of the overrepresentation of English in the training corpora.

[bakugo]

> their web searches need to be done in French to return reasonable results.

I wonder how much of this is also just the search engine's region setting.

It's a big problem I regularly have with Google. I almost always want English language, US-centric results, so I have my region set to the US. But occasionally I want results relevant to my actual country, and even searching in my native language usually yields much worse results than just opening an incognito tab and letting it default to my real location.

[black_puppydog]

I gave up on Google's language and region settings a long time ago, years before giving up on google as a product.

To this day they still think I'm in Sweden sometimes, in Paris other times, or in Germany, while I haven't lived in any of those places for years.

[RobotToaster]

Have you tried asking it to translate the prompt to French, and then feeding it the translated prompt?

[tallanvor]

I have the opposite problem. I often have to ask ChatGPT about things related to Norway and I have to constantly correct it when it keeps switching to responding in Norwegian no matter how many times I tell it to only answer in Norwegian when I request it.

[a2128]

What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool's move

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

It's also a bit funny because Norway definitely has enough money to hire a team of Anthropic's best to go out there and train them a model that does whatever they want. They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor.

[schubidubiduba]

I highly doubt that hiring people who don't even speak the language would result in a better model for Norwegian. If anything, they could pay Anthropic for some tips and tricks for training. But that does not seem necessary as Deepseek & co detail everything for free

[joe_mamba]

>They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor.

Which is bizarre to me Norway doesn't have a booming tech sector with all hat wealth fund acting as the biggest VC.

They instead use their wealth fund to invest in US's tech sector. Baffling.

[kalli]

The point of the fund is to invest outside of Norway so as to avoid the Norwegian economy overheating and increasing inflation

[NorwegianDude]

Considering the fact that the US is complaining about Norway putting too much money into the US market, imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway. It would be chaos.

[joe_mamba]

> imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway.

It would create jobs, sovereignty, intellectual property and soft power?

Instead it goes to strengthening the tech monopoly of a country that threatens to invade your neighbour.

[schubidubiduba]

There's only so much you can do with 5 million people. Especially in a field where network effects amd scale matter a lot.

[joe_mamba]

Finland has same population as Norway, has way less money, but has 3x the scaleups. Even bigger difference with vs Netherlands.

Even Norway themselves admit they're the underperformers of the Nordics. https://skywlkr.no/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TechScaleupNor...

So blaming population is a cheap excuse that doesn't hold water. Especially that you can always import the skilled people you lack, when you have virtually unlimited money and some of the highest standards of living in the world.

[fastasucan]

The fund is specifically mandated to not invest inside Norway to avoid making an enormous bubble and sky high inflation.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, was about to comment that too, instead of training a new model and new weights exclusively for Norwegian (and expecting/wanting every other small/medium-sized country to do the same) which seems infinity harder, they could have made high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English, and making it all public. I guess there still would be a worry that it'd be counted as "less important" compared to other history, news and culture about other countries.

[pjc50]

Oddly enough, my wife was recently involved in a project to translate historical crime novels from Norwegian; since all the available late 20th century Scandinavian crime novels have already been translated and turned into popular TV series, the plan was to go further back. Into the 1930s. The first cut was done with LLMs, but encountered the problem that (a) Norwegian itself has changed noticeably since then, in both major dialects, and (b) the machine translation deteriorated on large sections, resulting in entirely missing paragraphs and pages in a few places. Not to mention the usual translation issues (what police role does lensman map to?) and localisation (to what extent should the casual antisemitism be left in or removed?)

Translation is never a bijective process. It's never quite the same experience in translation as it is in the original, due to the cultural differences between reader and writer. Larger in this case because 1930s Norway is very different even from 2020s Norway.

Ultimately this was not a success due to marketing difficulties; it is very difficult to get a book noticed.

( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Iron-Chariot-Nordic-Crime-Library/d... )

[embedding-shape]

Sorry if I was unclear, I didn't want to give the impression I think translations or even transcriptions in some cases is easy, or without problems, or not painstakingly time-consuming, it very much is.

I just think building a LLM from scratch is ever harder, with more potential problems that are harder to solve, more time-consuming and even more resource-intensive.

[jononor]

It would require an investment, but those will pay dividends later, as it becomes easier to train LLMs on/for Norwegian. If we need to translate everything to English we might as well just drop using Norwegian altogether. Practically everyone speaks English fluently already...

[embedding-shape]

> as it becomes easier to train LLMs on/for Norwegian

Why would it be easier in the future? The advances we see with LLMs today require a huge amount of data, and it's getting hard getting the amount of data just using any language, I'm having a hard time seeing how it'd get easier for Norwegians to build their own LLM, unless they seriously start to ramp up how much Norwegian content they're putting out.

> If we need to translate everything to English we might as well just drop using Norwegian altogether. Practically everyone speaks English fluently already...

Yeah I mean with that black and white perspective you can pretty much do anything and it won't matter for anything :) I think for the rest of us, what we speak daily and what we rely on professionally, can differ, and that's OK. But maybe this is just my broken Swedish mind being so used to using English professionally but then conversing in Spanish outside of work daily, YMMV.

[fastasucan]

> in both major dialects

Nynorsk and bokmål is not dialects but variants of written Norwegian.

[makeitdouble]

> high quality transcriptions and translations of the stories currently described only in Norwegian into English

You make it sound like an easier task than training an LLM. I'd argue it's not obvious, and would assume the contrary.

[embedding-shape]

Yes, why wouldn't it be easier to transcribe and translate, skills humanity had for centuries, compared to LLMs that we've only learnt to build these last few years, and even require a frikken computer to do? Of course one of these is harder than the other...

[makeitdouble]

Look at it from this lens: translating and transcribing these stories hasn't happened for the centuries they existed, while as you point out the skills where always there. In contrast LLMs have been here for a few years at most and everyone and their dogs are trying to get in on the "race".

With absolutely no insight into why, which one has better odds to happen first is obvious to me.

[embedding-shape]

Sure, it isn't as "hot" to translate stuff as it used to be some hundreds of years ago, and building LLMs surely is "hot" today, I don't doubt more people are attempting to build LLMs today than translating huge datasets, especially if we narrow the two to exclusively "In Norwegian".

Having insights into both translations, transcriptions and attempting to build LLMs myself, I'm fairly sure which effort would be successful first, regardless of how many attempt it first.

[vintermann]

Copyrights and statutes don't allow them to do that. The mandate of the National Library maybe permits them to make an LLM through (though I won't at all be surprised if someone sues them anyway).

[electroglyph]

absolutely. somebody online was wanting an LLM with Georgian language support, and that's exactly what i suggested: start digitizing Georgian text.

[onion2k]

wouldn't the most obvious thing to do be to build a good training dataset and make the dataset widely available?

Only if you believe other people will value that enough to expend the effort necessary to use it. If you believe other people will see it as low value and ignore it then you'd be better off doing the training yourself in order to guarantee it happens.

There's also a secondary benefit that your team doing the work will learn some useful skills while they do it.

[blks]

Because state of the art models are owned and controlled by foreign agents.

[gizajob]

Because you have so much money you don’t know what to do with it any more.

[vintermann]

Permissions, probably. Copyrights and statutes. Knowing the librarians, unfortunately the prestige of their job is more vested in denying you access than giving you access.

I mean it's their job to give people access to information, and they certainly do, but the mark of a professional, in their eyes, is guarding information. It's much more embarrassing for them professionally to give too much access than too little.

LLM training gives them a "respectable" way of bypassing that and give the world their information (which, in fairness, they probably all really want to do if they could).

[vasco]

If they wanted to they all have scanners and access to information on how to create torrents. Setting the information free isn't complicated, so it'd seem most of them, do not want to.

[vintermann]

Where do you seed a 60 petabyte torrent? I'm sure some choice cuts of what individuals feel is important have made it to Anna's, but I don't think refusal to go on a full data liberation spree is evidence they don't care.

[fransje26]

> Why go to the expense of training your own model, especially when it will be inferior to state of the art models.

Uuh.. No? Especially of the training data, as in this case, is of better quality.

[_cs2017_]

> Why go to the expense...

Answer: idiocy of decision makers and the desire to get resources by those who created the proposal.

I assumed Scandinavia has better decision processes but apparently I was wrong.

[amarant]

Not remotely true in my estimation. I don't really speak Norwegian, but I do speak Swedish(which means I mostly understand Norwegian as they're very similar). Every model I've tried speaking Swedish to does it perfectly. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for Norwegian already

[schubidubiduba]

Of course they speak swedish. But often, they do not reason in Swedish and do not search in swedish. Swedish makes up a tiny fraction of training data, while the vast majority is English, from the US. Which means the answers will always have a bias towards US culture, even if you ask in Swedish and the LLM answers in Swedish.

[NorwegianDude]

While Google does a good job with language support in their models, GPT-5.5 can't write proper Norwegian. It's even making up words that does not exist.

[mistrial9]

different models have been very different in this way.. almost ten years ago the French made a very large effort to capture languages.. the release notes I read at the time IIR had quite a few languages from South Asia / India, and in Africa. The language that was prominently missing was German IIR. I cannot say for the 2025-2026 models since so much has happened.. but models are not equal.

[vintermann]

Does that include local distilled models? Because it didn't last time I checked for Norwegian.

[varjag]

Not really. For instance Facebook speech recognition models had Swedish support but no Norwegian.

[vintermann]

Foreign LLMs are probably not trained on the Norwegian National Library. I regularly find things in there (with regular keyword search, for genealogy) which neither search engines or language models know.

Of course I then usually put the information I'm interested in somewhere AI could scrape it. But it would take a long, long time to get everything interesting out of there.

[intronic]

Yep in the article it says ..the National Library .. has the single largest digital collection of Norwegian books, newspapers, web pages .. it is entitled to receive copies of every published book and broadcasted content. Its legal deposit mandate in this area extended beyond books, as it was duty-bound to collect and preserve all of Norway’s cultural heritage .. an agreement with Norwegian newspapers permitted LLM training on copyrighted content.

Husnes said: ”No private company has this.”

So yeah they seem to have proprietary data...

[pastage]

> proprietary data

It is just copyrighted data, that is harder to get a hold of. All the copies are available to anyone to use if they just read it. Copyright makes other uses complicated. I wonder if the whole Creative commons debate was a mistake, you can never fix copyright in a digital world.

[orbital-decay]

Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures, so it's untrue at least for the "any" qualifier. Performance is barely affected or might be even better sometimes. However English patterns can subtly leak into native patterns of other languages. It's obviously very different for low-resource languages, but to improve them you need more data, not a new model.

[Barrin92]

>Current-best models are pretty fluent at major languages and cultures

strong disagree on that one. As a German interacting with ChatGPT, even in German it gives me the feeling of talking to the Pluribus people, which reminds me of an anecdote of Walmart failing in Germany because people were freaked out by the constantly upbeat, smiling employees.

Understanding a culture is a very different task than translating the syntax of a text, and these systems might be capable of syntactic fluency but they do not really understand culture. You have to metaphorically abuse these models until they stop sounding like the crossover of a HR department person and a Mormon missionary

[bblb]

I'm Finnish and dear god I hate the default overtly friendly tones of LLMs. Always the first thing to tune in system prompt.

You're a machine, stop anthropomorphizing yourself and pretending to be my best friend, and just give me the damn answer and nothing else. :D

[ampersandwhich]

I fully agree. I'm Swedish and have recently used GPT to help me draft some cover letters in Swedish. Even with all the mandatory personality tweaks and prompting, it always seems to default to highly florid and self-congratulatory Americanisms if I'm not careful. It's very subtle.

I do understand where proponents of language equivalency are coming from. LLMs seem to be extremely good at answering simple, one-shot type questions and mechanical 'low-level' translations for most languages. I feel like as soon as you introduce complex chains of thought or multi-step cross-linguistic tasks, minor imperfections stack and become magnified, just as with coding tasks or context rot.

[varjag]

Set the personality to 'Robot', it makes the interactions so much more tolerable.

[internet_points]

Maybe it can at least write like a Norwegian instead of just English-translated-into-Norwegian. It would be interesting to see if they try something like the experiments in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22445 on it.

[DiogenesKynikos]

As the article explains, Norway's National Library has a database of practically everything published and broadcast in Norwegian going back many decades. From the way the dataset described in the article, it does not sound like OpenAI et al. would have easy access to it in its entirety.

[intended]

Quite true ?

English is ludicrously over abundant in training when compared to any language.

[KeplerBoy]

And that's probably necessary if you want a competent model. There simply isn't much norwegian literature on let's say banana farming.

[amelius]

It's probably just an excuse to play with LLMs using big government funding :)

[alliao]

yeah and alignment is all about how to be less evil which is no easy job... I can just imagine Chinese LLM renders 1989 tianmen square as an incident orchestrated by CIA which CCP successfully thwarted etc etc