I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.
Just open weights are not enough, I think as a nation state you'd at least want a whole sovereign training pipeline. Otherwise you are stuck when Kimi K4 stops releasing their weights.
But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.
You want to, of course. There are several multi-billion dollar programs to subsidize fabs starting european offshoots. But so far not very successful, and it's not like one endeavour is blocking the other here.
We have lots of capable open weights models, but very few have actual datasets and pipelines open for reproducibility. This is a major issue that even if big companies addressed, policies could well just change, as you also acknowledge.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
> Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
Yeah we can, we do it all the time. Nothing in society works without relying on private actors to keep doing what they have always done. Unless you go full soviet command economy, which in fact works worse.
Society and the private sector cooperates, but any technical dependency is detrimental because of monopolization of interests. You don't need to go full soviet, but knowledge in general must be socialized, that includes access to technology.
We literally grant 20 year monopolies on technologies to their inventors and have for centuries and it's fine. The entire economy runs on chips made by like, 3 foundries using lithography machines made by 1 company. I think you are overstating the necessity.
Autarky would be a national security disaster manifested. You can't be a modern prosperous society and not rely on either trade nor private enterprise.
Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.
Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.
Because if you can't build the model from scratch you don't have a model. Open weights are nice but fixed in time. This isn't a technology that stays static, it improves, and sovereignty means being able to continue to improve independently.
Open weight and -source models aren't without biases. Giving a model away for free would be a good way to distribute an agenda. With a sovereign model you can at least control the agenda and align it with your values.
