Yesterday, Commissioner for internal market Thierry Breton is awarding four European artificial intelligence (AI) startups prizes from the Large AI Grand Challenge, launched on 23 November 2023.

The Grand Challenge is designed to reward innovative startups and SMEs for devising ambitious strategies and making commitments to develop large-scale AI models that will provide a competitive edge for Europe. 

The winners are Tilde (Latvia), an NLP and machine translation, Textgain (Belgium), an AI startup that enables companies and governments to gain valuable insights from unstructured data, Lingua Custodia (France), a Fintech company specialising in AI/natural language processing (NLP) for finance, and Unbabel (Portugal), a language technologies company with headquarters in Lisbon.

The Challenge received 94 proposals.

The winners will share a prize of a total of €1 million and access to two of Europe’s world-leading supercomputers, LUMI or LEONARDO for 8 million hours.
This supercomputer time will be used to develop innovative large-scale AI models in the 12 months following today’s awards. The winners are then expected to release the developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use, or through publishing their research findings. 
The Large AI Grand Challenge was organised by the EU funded project AI-BOOST, and is part of the EU’s commitment to drive excellence in AI.  

You will find more information in the EuroHPC press release.