ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure

The article says

“ Open LLMs are increasingly viewed as credible alternatives to commercial systems, most of which are developed behind closed doors in the United States or China”

It is obvious that the companies producing big LLMs today have the incentive to try to enshitify them. Trying to get subscriptions at the same time as trying to do product placement ads etc. Worse, some already have political biases they promote.

It would be wonderful if a partnership between academia and government in Europe can do a public good search and AI that endeavours to serve the user over the company.

Yes but it’s a very complicated service to deliver. Even if they train great models, they likely will not operationalize them for inference. Those will still be private actors, and the incentives to enshittify will be the same. Also, for AI generally the incentives is much higher than last tech generation, due to cost of running these things. Basically, the free services where you’re the product must aggressively extract value out of you in order to make a profit.