EU supports building large-scale multilingual AI model

The European Commission has selected the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian company Domyn, as the winner of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge to develop an open-source artificial intelligence model covering all 24 official European Union languages.

The initiative aims to strengthen Europe's capacity to develop advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems using its own infrastructure and resources, the EU Commission said in a statement.

Launched in February, the Frontier AI Grand Challenge invited leading European AI innovators to propose a model with more than 400 billion parameters, a scale associated with the world's most advanced AI systems.

According to the EU Commission, the EUROPA project will create a frontier AI model that will be openly available, enabling businesses, researchers, and public institutions across the bloc to benefit from advanced AI technologies while supporting Europe's linguistic diversity.

"Europe can lead in advanced AI on its own terms. EUROPA will build a frontier European AI model in all 24 EU languages, showing that we can match the best while staying true to our values," said Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy.

"This is about strengthening Europe's ability to shape AI's future with openness, trust and strategic autonomy at its core," she added.