Open source LLMs hit Europe's digital sovereignty roadmap
Large language models (LLMs) landed on Europe’s digital sovereignty agenda with a bang last week, as news emerged of a new program to develop a series of “truly” open source LLMs covering all European Union languages.
This includes the current 24 official EU languages, as well as languages for countries currently negotiating for entry to the EU market, such as Albania. Future-proofing is the name of the game.
OpenEuroLLM is a collaboration between some 20 organizations, co-led by Jan Hajič, a computational linguist from the Charles University in Prague, and Peter Sarlin, CEO and co-founder of Finnish AI lab Silo AI, which AMD acquired last year for $665 million.
The project fits a broader narrative that has seen Europe push digital sovereignty as a priority, enabling it to bring mission-critical infrastructure and tools closer to home. Most of the cloud giants are investing in local infrastructure to ensure EU data stays local, while AI darling OpenAI recently unveiled a new offering that allows customers to process and store data in Europe.