Lingua Custodia, Unbabel, Tilde, Textgain Win EC’s Large AI Grand Challenge

The European Commission (EC) announced on June 26, 2024, the winners of the Large AI Grand Challenge contest, launched in 2023 as part of the European Union (EU) AI-BOOST project. AI-innovative startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were invited to submit proposals from November 16, 2023, to February 13, 2024.

Participating companies were competing for the development of a foundation model using one of the EU High-Performance Computing (HPC) sites, part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). EuroHPC JU is a collaborative effort between the EU and participating Member States created to foster the EU’s advancement in AI and supercomputing (as part of the GenAI4EU initiative).

The winners are France-based Lingua Custodia, which specializes in AI and natural language processing (NLP) for the finance sector; Unbabel, a language technology and services company based in Portugal; Latvia’s Tilde, a language technology, MT, and Balto-Slavic languages company; and Textgain, an AI start-up based in Belgium focused on predictive text and speech analysis.

The four winners competed with 90 other companies to win EUR 250k and access to 2 million compute hours each at one of the two EU HPC sites. These language AI technology companies will also have the opportunity to become part of a network that collaborates with European Commission DG Connect – CNECT AI and Robotics and EuroHPC-JU.

The main requirements for the foundation model are that it must be trained from scratch using state-of-the-art methods and have 30 billion parameters at a minimum. In their proposals, the companies had to offer a rationale for the model’s relevance and the use of HPC. They also had to demonstrate internal expertise in training foundation models using HPC systems along with a plan for using said EuroHPC JU systems.

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The EU supercomputers are available through “access calls,” which are invitations to apply for time-to-use supercomputing resources. Eligible parties include researchers from academia and other institutions, public authorities, and companies established or located in an EU Member State or a third country associated with the Digital Europe Programme or Horizon Europe.