European Commissioner Thierry Breton has announced that Latvian company Tilde is a winner of the EC’s 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 is one of four startups that will share a total prize of €1 million and an allocation of 8 million GPU hours on two of the world-leading EuroHPC JU supercomputers, LUMI and LEONARDO. The other winners come from France, Portugal and Belgium.

In November 2023, the Large AI Grand Challenge was launched to foster European innovation and excellence in large-scale AI models.

The purpose of the Large AI Grand Challenge, funded by the European Commission, is to expand European Artificial Intelligence (AI) frontiers by harnessing the potential of large-scale AI models. The participants in the competition were startups and SMEs with the technical capacity to develop AI models that boost Europe’s competitiveness in Generative AI.

Tilde, which is perhaps best known for its automatic translation services, participated in the competition with the 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,” said a release from the company.

“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, summarization, 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 company said.

“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,” said Arturs Vasilevskis, Tilde CEO.