European Commissioner Thierry Breton announced that Tilde, Europe’s leading language technology company, is the winner of the Large-Scale AI Grand Challenge. The prize includes a cash prize of €250,000 and 2 million GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hours on Europe’s fastest supercomputer, LUMI, to develop the foundational Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs) for European languages. Tilde will use these resources to address linguistic inequality in generative AI and promote linguistic inclusivity and access to the technology across the continent.
The European Commission-funded Large AI Grand Challenge aims to expand the frontier of AI in Europe by harnessing the potential of large-scale AI models. Participants in the competition are innovative start-ups and SMEs with the technical capacity to develop AI models that will increase Europe’s competitiveness in generative AI.
Latvian company Tilde entered the competition with the ambition to create a new large-scale AI model that will promote linguistic inclusivity in Europe. Currently, large-scale AI models are trained mainly on English and a few major world languages, which leaves many European languages under-represented, causing linguistic inequality at the core of the models. Tilde aims to create a foundational multilingual LLM that represents the linguistic richness of Europe, with a special focus on Eastern European and Baltic languages that are under-covered by current models. Tilde’s models will improve AI applications and natural language processing tools for over 155 million Europeans. Tilde’s high-parameter LLM will support applications such as machine translation, text generation, summarization, and text classification. The project follows open science principles and ethical data processing, and will make resources freely available within and outside the research community.
“This award recognises Tilde’s commitment to bringing cutting-edge AI developments to all European language communities. Our team of experienced researchers, engineers and linguists is excited about the opportunity to harness one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to create new models from the vast amounts of data we collect,” said Arturs Vasilevskis, CEO of Tilde.
Tilde’s innovative approach and commitment to ethical and open-access solutions will have a profound impact, ensuring that advanced AI technology benefits all EU languages and promotes digital equity and inclusion. The 2 million GPU hours and €250,000 prize money awarded will be used to achieve these goals over the next year.
About Tilde
Tilde is Europe’s leading AI-driven language technology company, supporting linguistic diversity and enabling multilingual communication in the digital age. At the core of Tilde’s work is its research and innovation hub, the Tilde Language Lab. Combining pioneering European deep learning and transformer network experience, a highly skilled team and vast amounts of multilingual data, Tilde is driving language innovation and language equality in Europe.
For more information
Riva Lulina, head of marketing at Tilde
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