alt Hacker NewsI don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the text from one cannot be used to train a model for the other, or vice-versa.
All in all, I don't think that's a major issue here.
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Portugal has a growing Xenophobic attitude towards immigrants, specially Brazilians and this is reflected in linguistic prejudice.
They have concerns of portuguese children learning to "speak brazillian" because there is a lot more of video content being produced in Brasil than in Portugal and stuff like movies, videogames and software in general are avaliable in brazilian localization/adaptation first.
Right, but most of those speak brazilian portuguese. There's so much less european portuguese text that it becomes impossible for a model to not speak brazilian portuguese if not trained in a way that ignores brazilian sources
The whole point of this project is to have an LLM that speaks European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese.
Mutually intelligible, yes, but far from perfectly so. I speak both, as a native anglophone, and the difference is not so much “US vs British English” so much as “Guyanese English vs British English”. Like, fundamental points of grammar differ, the spoken rhythm and syllabic stress differs (poetry does not translate well between them), never mind just vocabulary. Continental Portuguese people tend to find it easier to understand brasileiros than vice versa, largely due to mostly one-way cultural exports, but to try to roll both into a single model would create a creole at best.
The authors are pretty clearly trying to draw only from European Portuguese sources - I feel like there's a fairly widespread attitude here that the language is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Brazilian speakers (which there is obviously at least some truth to).
I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be prickly about the meteoric rise of US English)