Large AI Grand Challenge winners to utilize LUMI and Leonardo announced

The European Commission announced the Large AI Grand Challenge winners: four innovative AI start-ups from Europe will share the €1 million prize and 8 million computational hours, advancing Europe’s leadership in AI development. These start-ups will be utilizing EuroHPC JU’s supercomputers LUMI and Leonardo to develop their large-scale AI models over the next 12 months.

In June, Commissioner Thierry Breton awarded the Large AI Grand Challenge winners at a ceremony held at Berlaymont in Brussels. The Large AI Grand Challenge was launched in November 2023 to foster European innovation and excellence in large-scale AI models.

Large AI Grand Challenge award ceremony. Image: AI-BOOST

The winners are:

Lingua Custodia (France) is a fintech company specialising in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the finance sector. It aims to enhance fintech sector operations with solutions designed to achieve speeds five times faster than current systems.

Unbabel (Portugal) is a language technologies company that combines AI and human translation for multilingual support, encompassing all 24 official EU languages.

Tilde (Latvia) is an expert in language technologies. It offers machine translation and AI-powered chatbots, targeting Balto-Slavic languages spoken by 155 million individuals within the EU and candidate countries.

Textgain (Belgium) is an AI start-up that enables companies and governments to gain insights from unstructured data through predictive text analytics. It focuses on analyzing hate speech, an area of significant concern that has historically received limited attention.

These four start-ups will share a total prize of €1 million and an allocation of 8 million GPU hours on two of the world-leading EuroHPC JU supercomputers, LUMI and Leonardo. The awarded supercomputing time will be essential for developing their large-scale AI models over the next 12 months and will enable them to reduce training times from years to weeks. The winners are expected to release their developed models under an open-source license for non-commercial use or publish their research findings after this period.

The Large AI Challenge received 94 proposals, showcasing the competitive nature of Europe’s AI landscape.