The European Commission (EC) announced on June 26, 2024, the winners of the Large AI Grand Challenge contest, launched in 2023 as part of the European Union (EU) AI-BOOST project. AI-innovative startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were invited to submit proposals from November 16, 2023, to February 13, 2024.

Participating companies were competing for the development of a foundation model using one of the EU High-Performance Computing (HPC) sites, part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). EuroHPC JU is a collaborative effort between the EU and participating Member States created to foster the EU’s advancement in AI and supercomputing (as part of the GenAI4EU initiative).

The winners are France-based Lingua Custodia, which specializes in AI and natural language processing (NLP) for the finance sector; Unbabel, a language technology and services company based in Portugal; Latvia’s Tilde, a language technology, MT, and Balto-Slavic languages company; and Textgain, an AI start-up based in Belgium focused on predictive text and speech analysis.

The four winners competed with 90 other companies to win EUR 250k and access to 2 million compute hours each at one of the two EU HPC sites. These language AI technology companies will also have the opportunity to become part of a network that collaborates with European Commission DG Connect – CNECT AI and Robotics and EuroHPC-JU.

The main requirements for the foundation model are that it must be trained from scratch using state-of-the-art methods and have 30 billion parameters at a minimum. In their proposals, the companies had to offer a rationale for the model’s relevance and the use of HPC. They also had to demonstrate internal expertise in training foundation models using HPC systems along with a plan for using said EuroHPC JU systems.

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The EU supercomputers are available through “access calls,” which are invitations to apply for time-to-use supercomputing resources. Eligible parties include researchers from academia and other institutions, public authorities, and companies established or located in an EU Member State or a third country associated with the Digital Europe Programme or Horizon Europe.