EC Commissioner Thierry Breton just announced Tilde, a leading European language technology company, as a winner of the Large AI Grand Challenge. The award includes a € 250,000 monetary prize and 2 million GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hours on the fastest supercomputer in Europe, LUMI, to develop a foundational Large Language Model (LLM) for European languages. Tilde will use these resources to address language inequality in Generative AI and advance linguistic inclusivity and technological access throughout the continent.
The purpose of the Large AI Grand Challenge, funded by the European Commission, is to expand European AI frontiers by harnessing the potential of large-scale AI models. The participants in the competition were innovative startups and SMEs with the technical capacity to develop AI models that boost Europe’s competitiveness in Generative AI.
The Latvian company Tilde participated in the competition with an ambition to create a novel large AI model that advances linguistic inclusivity in Europe. Currently, large AI models are trained predominantly on English and a few major global languages, leaving many European languages underrepresented and causing language inequality at the core of the models. Tilde aims to create a foundational multilingual LLM that represents European linguistic richness, with a particular focus on Eastern European and Baltic languages that are poorly covered in the current models. Tilde’s model will improve AI applications and Natural Language Processing tools for over 155 million Europeans. The high-parameter LLM by Tilde will support applications such as machine translation, text generation, summarisation, text classification, and many others. The project will follow open science principles and ethical data handling, making resources freely available to the research community and beyond.
“The award is recognition of Tilde’s commitment to bringing state-of-the-art developments in AI to all linguistic communities of Europe. Our team of experienced researchers, engineers and linguists is thrilled to have the opportunity to exploit one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to create a novel model from the massive data that we have collected,” says Arturs Vasilevskis, Tilde CEO.
Tilde’s innovative approach and commitment to ethical, open-access solutions are set to make a significant impact, ensuring that advanced AI technologies benefit all languages in the EU, promoting digital equity and inclusion. The awarded 2 million GPU hours and the monetary prize of € 250,000 will be used to achieve these goals over the next year.
About Tilde
As a leading European AI-driven language technology company, Tilde supports language diversity in the digital age and enables multilingual communication. At the core of Tilde’s operations is Tilde Language Lab, a hub for research and innovation. Combining experience from pioneering deep learning and transformer networks in Europe, a highly skilled team, and an extensive amount of multilingual data, Tilde drives innovation and language equality for European languages.
For more information
Liva Lurina, Head of Marketing at Tilde
liva.lurina@tilde.com