Ah also almost forgot there are some less important but funny things that most Danish people don't know :
Like for example I can be deported if I receive any public benefits....including Ungdomskort (which is just discounted travel pass between home and uni)😂
Lastly I just want to add then I am writing all of this not because I am international student I am want to have an easier life for me 😂
I find that having international and multicultural perspective is very important in education (even STEM) and I think Denmark could have really benefited from it
I have written small thread down this post, hope it provides some clarity !
Yes this is biased perspective (since I am international student) also I am not a Danish citizen so I am not in the position to influence Danish politics
*when I say international students I mean all non-EU students, so US/UK/Canada/Australia and so on also included
All this clearly sends the signal that "internationals are not welcome" and reputation matters a lot for country when welcoming foreign talent
Why is that important?
Since PhD is Denmark are usually done after the Masters, and if my assumption is correct and there will be significant drop of international Masters student - Denmark might miss the opportunity to capture the talents earlier to later develop them in a PhD/Postdoc
And the outcome :
Denmark is clearly less attractive then Germany and it is harder for international students to finance themselves then in Sweden (and potentially they won't be able to bring spouses)
3. In Germany Masters are essentially free in many regions, in Sweden they cost roughly the same as in Denmark (7500€ per semester)
There are of course other practical factors, but these 3 are the ones that most international students consider the most (aside from academical) ->
For context we take Sweden and Germany and see how migration for students works in them :
1. Both in Germany and Sweden you can bring spouses (and no plans to abolish that)
2. In Sweden you can work 40hours per week, in Germany the system is more complicate we will round it up to 20
This is largely related to the "scandal with students from Bangladesh and Nepal". I won't discuss it here in detail, I want to discuss the results :
And the result is that new rules are introduced that make Denmark significantly less attractive, why ?
I will be mainly talking about governmental and political decisions and discuss it from my perspective as international student in Denmark
Recently new bill was proposed that severely damages attractiveness of Denmark for international students :
Disclaimer :
I am grateful to DTU for giving me an opportunity to study, it is a wonderful university
Also the people in research, open source and startup communities around AI in Denmark extremely supportive and friendly 🤗
And because of this I really want to see Danish AI scene to succeed ->
Quite important thread as documentation of sadly horrible reality of American science but I want to discuss the other side of it
EU counties in my opinion done next to nothing to capitalize on that opportunity and I would argue that in case of Denmark actually made it less attractive to students
Genuinely curious how it works, like chatGPT responses are not instant (and I assume it take some time to read the response and try to understand it if the question is complex)
Do people just, sit in silence for like couple of minutes or how it works ?
For the sake of my mental health I will leave social media until Danish election season is finished
Had an experience reading news/election campaigns while being immigrant in sweden during election season and it was not fun (to put in mildly)
How Europeans view average American city :
True, I have actually missed the exact point when labs stoped providing logits because of "distillation anxiety", somewhere in early 2024 ?
Oh yeah, somehow forgot about LLM-as-judge even though it was explicitly mentioned
And I agree that you can not really call it distillation in a sense how most people image it
Also realistically
Chinese labs most likely aren't directly training on Claude's outputs (because not 150k, not even 13 million is enough for something like a frontier-level performance lol)
My prediction - most likely they're using Opus outputs as seeds for synthetic data
Ok now I want to distill Opus just out of spite
Ah, didn't know that
Could it because Z.AI have IPOd and they could take more legal action against accusation ?
Nah they should stop pretending this is some "national security" issue
They have cut access to xAI and OpenAI for their coding tools also. It is pretty obvious that Anthropic is afraid of the competition at this point
techcrunch.com/2025/08/02/a...
And like in computer vision models you often end up just randomly guessing towards the end just to get a better score
Be honest, you like it because it is happening in Malmö this year 😂😂
I think your students will definitely appreciate;) tbh I see how it becoming increasingly more important both in research but also industry
Thank you for the link !
Yeah special course might be interesting, also I have still this annoying idea of adding VLM benchmarks to EuroEval
But I am afraid that has to wait at least till Summer because I am totally busy with current studies/research projects 😞
I must admit, that at this point I would strongly benefit from the university course that focuses just on model evaluation (both CV and LLMs)
Like I am taking many courses on how to train stuff, but imho it is as important to be able to evaluate what you have trained
Ahahaha that's a good one
