EU Commission awards Large AI Grand Challenge prizes to innovative European AI startups and SMEs
Today, 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 aims to recognize forward-thinking startups and SMEs that have developed ambitious strategies and demonstrated a commitment to creating large-scale AI models that will enhance Europe’s competitiveness in the global market.
Out of the 94 proposals received, the winners of the Large AI Grand Challenge are as follows:
– Tilde (Latvia): Specializing in natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation.
– Textgain (Belgium): Enabling companies and governments to extract valuable insights from unstructured data.
– Lingua Custodia (France): A Fintech company focused on AI and natural language processing (NLP) within the finance sector.
– Unbabel (Portugal): A language technology company headquartered in Lisbon.
The winners will collectively receive a total prize of €1 million and gain access to extensive supercomputer resources on two of Europe’s top supercomputers, LUMI or LEONARDO, for a combined total of 8 million hours.
This supercomputing power will be utilized by the winners over the next 12 months to develop innovative large-scale AI models. Subsequently, the developed models are expected to be released under an open-source license for non-commercial use or shared through the publication of research findings.
Organized by the EU-funded project AI-BOOST, the Large AI Grand Challenge reflects the EU’s dedication to fostering excellence in the field of artificial intelligence and driving innovation across Europe’s startup and SME landscape.
