I wouldn’t have imagined cloudflare acquiring Deno. But AI got into both of them and somehow now it makes sense? It’s wild. Anyhow congrats to Deno team.
I am on the same boat. 3.5 medium was disappointing, glm 5.2 and 5.3 were very welcome. But I still cannot leave anthropic or openai. This chonky model being expensive, mistral’s subscription quota will run out ridiculously fast
Yes, it arrived months late. The waiting was too long I started losing faith. But when I saw Mistral’s series funding news, I knew they are on the right track. 3 billion EUR is just too significant
It is a good approach to promote it as a German model. But I wonder if it really thinks like the German think. I speculate they just translated texts in other languages, likely English and Chinese, into German.
Hey, I worked on pre-training data Kolibri. We spent considerable time and effort to go beyond just translating. For example by building a pipeline that processes Common Crawl dumps specifically for German. You might be interested in a related blog post: https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/sauerkraut-not-burgers-why-g...
Congrats! I am surprised that you first chose Korea for PhD. As myself being Korean, I hear a lot of horrendous stories about PhD students in Korea. They tend to spend for more than +8 years. I know a few people who went through their PhDs and certainly it took +8 years for all of them. I did my PhD by the way in France and it took me 4 years.
Did you know that it could take so long when you first started your PhD in Korea? Could this be one of your reasons to move to Japan?
My decision to start my PhD in Korea was under very different circumstances. I was studying a totally different field (automata theory, so closer to mathematics than ML) where longer PhDs were normal, I was used to the US system, I wasn't working or married, etc. I expected it to take ~6 years when I started.
I basically had to choose between living in the Canadian countryside, Helsinki, or Seoul in order to be in a lab studying what I wanted. I was already pretty into Korean culture (I minored in Korean in college, studied abroad there, and was a serious StarCraft player) so that choice was easy!
When I started looking again, I knew I wanted a shorter PhD (especially since I had a masters and industry + industry research experience), so Japan was pretty attractive.
I will admit that I think 3 years is a little short to make substantive progress outside of machine learning, so unless you come in with a lot of research experience and a good idea of what you want to work on, I think a longer PhD would be beneficial, but the opportunity cost is so high that it really doesn't seem like a great option on paper.
FWIW, the "extended" Korean PhD is an artifact of grant projects that need people to do the busy work (usually reports), and it seemed to be uncommon to have foreign students thrown into that pool. Scholarship max durations are also a limiting factor.
One aspect worth calling out as a huge plus of Japanese national institutions which the author didn't disclose is funding for compute is much better than what one would get from a Korean institution (e.g. the author's school runs one of the biggest GPU clusters in Japan).
